In educatorslog.in in spotlight section Link:http://educatorslogin.com/grow/tip/archive/dr_arun_mehta_skid_open_source_software_innovation_to_help_children_with_disabilities SKID: Dr. Arun Mehta's Open Source Software Innovation to Help Children With Disabilities
India, sadly, presents a very hostile environment for disabled people in general, and children in particular – not just with respect to missed opportunities for learning and education, but for participation in several normal activities that most regular children enjoy. For many such children, the disability is compounded by an inability to communicate. Fortunately for them, there are people like Dr. Arun Mehta - winner of the Manthan Award for e-Inclusion in 2008 - who are working tirelessly to change the landscape for disabled children in India through developing innovative software and hardware solutions to help such children communicate.
A few weeks ago Professor Arun Mehta showcased a new software to provide free of cost communication support to children with special needs and all those who have difficulty with the keyboard and mouse. The software is called Skid (short for Special Kid). skid.org.in is home to a large group of software modules that children can use from any PC or mobile phone with access to the web. It is also a unique platform for learning web programming. The first module which has recently been made available online is co-designed by students from JMIT, Radaur, and allows special kids access to Wikipedia. (The more technically inclined would be interested to know that Skid has been developed on the open source web framework Ruby on Rails). Skid has won Dr. Arun Mehta and his colleague Vickram Crishna, the 2008 Manthan Award for e-Inclusion.
Dr. Arun Mehta and his colleagues have conducted 3 workshops in Dehradun and Bangalore over the last 3 years, involving over 30 children with autism and their care givers, in collaboration with the Autism Society of India, Inspiration, the Spastic Society of Karnataka, the Anil Karanjai Memorial Trust, and Radiophony. (One such workshop in Bangalore has been described in detailed here on educatorslog.in and in this article on indiatogether.com). These workshops provided feedback on the use of existing open source software in this domain, and also inspired Skid, which has since been tried out with children with autism in the workshop organized in July 2008 in Dehradun. Early versions of the software were taken through their paces by children with cerebral palsy at AADI. Given diverse kinds of disability, even within autism, cerebral palsy and dyslexia, and the different ways in which children might wish to use computers, there is an ongoing need to keep adding modules, and finding imaginative new ways to combine them. To address this need, the Skid initiative invites college students who know a little programming to undergo free of cost summer training in which they write software that doesn't just gather dust, but is put onto the web. Not only do they have the satisfaction that thousands of kids from around the world are benefiting from what they wrote, they also receive public credit on the page they helped desi ========================================================================================
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