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Oculus Launchpad Dev Blog- 11th Entry- DevLog 757.011

KingHedleyiii
Explorer

Like the shirt? Me too 😉

Underdog- What is it and what is it about?

I'm taking a bit of a timeout on this post to give more of an overview of what this game is, where it came from, and where I see it going- just so I can share a bit of why I want to get it made, and why I’m taking it on as a personal mission to do so. I was a special education teacher for almost 10 years. 3 of those years I taught a high school class for kids with moderate to severe autism in downtown LA. It was a funny time for me. I had just arrived in LA from Virginia to start my doctorate in Education at USC, and I was having a really hard time finding a teaching gig. Oddly enough, this particular autism class was truly the only job I could find. I had never really had any training with, or exposure to, autism - only what I had heard, or maybe seen in Rainman. That’s what everybody who doesn’t know thinks it is. So I was scared as hell when I got the job, because I had no idea what to expect. The last thing I expected was for that classroom to be one of the best experiences of my entire life.

I had mostly the same group of kids for 3 years, so we became more of a family as opposed to just students and teacher. I taught them how to cook, taught them how to swim, took them to almost every museum in Los Angeles, and they taught me how to be a better person, a better man. Because of this dynamic, I wanted to do everything I could for them to see them succeed in life. And when the kids would have classes in other classrooms besides my own, or other students would come to my class to do projects and activities with my students, I would see student dynamics that sometimes I liked and sometimes I didn’t. I knew my kids were potentially easy targets for people to take advantage of them, but I couldn’t really think of ways to train them in a routine kind of way for them not be taken advantage of. One day, I took the kids on a field trip to Beverly Center mall. We went to the Apple Store. One of kids, Cristian, decided to pull a Whodini on me and slipped away from the group for like 2 minutes. I found him next door at an electronics store playing video games. Cristian is a pretty fairly impacted student by his autism, it was a challenge to get him to learn concepts many days, but when I found him playing an Xbox game I saw this kid handling the controller better than I ever could. And I loved video games. That was when it hit me that maybe video game were an ‘in’  for me I had never considered before in terms of teaching the kids. Games were repeatable. They never got tired of doing the same thing over and over. And if you found one a kid liked, they were fun.


Some time around then (late 2012) I read an article about how USC was using VR to train soldiers in how to deal with PTSD in veterans from Iraq and Afghanistan. I thought to myself, that’s what my kids needed- a safe, repeatable environment to learn new skills. Just knowing that they could be easy targets for bullies, it was an easy connection for me to make that maybe VR should be used with kids from the autism community to try and curb exposure to bullying. I still have no idea how effective I think it could be in training the kids in interventions- all I really know is that I believe in my heart this is a good idea to try. There are tons of products and services that parents from this community spend thousands on every month, besides what they need for rent and food, to help their kids be their best selves. I know not all, but some of these products are scams and are playing to the desperation of some of these families. I knew a mom who spent $3000 minimum every month for her son, on top of her monthly expenses, so he could get the help he needed. I take that responsibility very seriously to know that parents are putting their trust in you to try and help their child. That’s why I want to make this product something that could really help- something that becomes truly important.
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