The Sixteen Cubes Game for Children Who Are Visually Impaired
By Evyapan, Naz A. G. Z.; Demirkan, Halime; Journal of Visual Impairment and Blindness, Vol. 94, No. 6, pp. 396-398Publication Date: June 2000
Article on a game that can help visually impaired children practice overcoming obstacles presented in everyday situations. The Sixteen Cubes Game can help to integrate the information users keep in different frames of reference, as it helps to develop a sense of scale, dimension, volume, weight, mass, classification, seriation, space, and time. The game consists of four platforms, each with four cubes. The basic object is to group cubes according to texture, sound, weight, or color, for children with low vision. An experiment was conducted with the game involving thirty students age seven to eleven who were born with blindness or low vision. One objective of the experiment was for the child to be moving throughout the game and to use his or her body independently in space. Another objective was for the student to become oriented with the moderator's voice, along with the sound the cube was making when shook. Each child's performance in orienting himself or herself to the observer's voice ad shaken cube and in grouping the cubes correctly, as well as the time he or she took to complete the game of all sixteen cubes, was recorded on an observation sheet. To measure the effects of the game and accompanying cubes on learning, a pretest and posttest were conducted a week apart. The scores on the posttest were higher than those of the pretest, with the girls scoring higher than the boys, and the children who were totally blind and those who could perceive light had higher scores than the children with low vision. As seen in the results of the experiment, the sixteen cubes game is proven to be successful in stimulating children who are blind or have low vision to use all of their senses and move about the environment. The article concludes that games and toys that stimulate children to use all their senses and expand their body and spacial awareness help children to interact with their environments independently.
Published by: AFB Press (Website:http://www.afb.org/Section.asp?SectionID=46)
American Foundation for the Blind (AFB) (Web Site: http://www.afb.org )
Link to text: http://www.afb.org/jviblogin.asp?var=7&referer=/jvib/JVIB940605.asp
