08-27-2016 10:31 PM
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.