Colorado Springs – Give 5-year-old Caroline Lewis a piece of paper and a pencil, and she will likely unleash a tornado of scribble, followed by extreme disinterest.
Give Caroline, who is developmentally delayed and has trouble paying attention, a touch-screen computer loaded with software developed by Air Force Academy cadets and faculty, and she draws lines guiding a baseball into a mitt and a fish into a bowl.
When the computer erupts in cheers for her success, Caroline grins.
“Again,” she says.
Caroline is taking a first step in learning how to write.
The computer program, PointScribe, is the first project of FalconWorks, a nonprofit charitable corporation run by cadets and faculty at the Air Force Academy. The goal of the program is twofold: Help the community and help cadets learn, said Maj. Duncan Stewart, chairman of FalconWorks and an academy management professor.
The idea for PointScribe came out of a therapy session with Stewart’s daughter, Alexis, 6, who has cerebral palsy and does not like to work with paper and pencil.
“Kids like Caroline and my daughter, kids with cerebral palsy, Down syndrome, ADD and ADHD … they can’t hold their attention,” Stewart said. “Kids with a visual attention disorder won’t look at what they’re doing; they have wandering eyes. They won’t look at the end of the pen.”
Simple paper and pen does not provide the sensory feedback that the computer does.
“This activity is a little more concrete,” said Katie Zellmer, occupational therapist in Academy School District 20. “It’s putting that ball in the mitt versus drawing a line between the two or putting the fish in the fishbowl.”
Zellmer and Stewart are encouraged by the progress in youngsters so far but do not yet know whether it will actually aid in writing.
“We’ll have to really work to transfer what they’re doing on the computer on the screen, writing letters, doing their shapes to paper. That will probably be a hard process for some of the kids,” Zellmer said.
FalconWorks has other projects in the works and is seeking new ideas from schools, hospitals and rehabilitation centers in the community.
Cadets Matt Hellier and Sebastian Hickey, seniors at the academy, began programming in January and learned Java, a programming language they had never used before, as they created the software for PointScribe.
“I just want to use something I know to help someone else,” Hellier said.
When he saw Caroline wiggling in her chair and grinning, Hellier grinned back.
“She was a lot happier using the computer, a lot more excited and focused than working with paper,” Hellier said. “It has been a real motivation to get back working.”
Staff writer Erin Emery can be reached at 719-522-1360 or eemery@denverpost.com.
