Technology to Help with Learning Disabilities?

GotSanity asks: "I have a little brother who is now 18 and still can not read or do basic math. At an early age he was diagnosed with a level 10 mental handicap. I am curious as to what technology is available to help teach him to read. The major problems with most educational software I have found is that they both cater to younger minds (even though he has a learning disability he still is involved with everyday teenager activities like video games and music) and are often far to expensive for a working class family. I originally got him a copy of Typing of the Dead, and through it he has been learning to read and spell better. What novel education ideas can the Slashdot community suggest?"

Comments

Hands-on and human interaction

[drivinghighway61]

My aunt was a teacher in special education, and I had the opportunity to help out on a few occasions. From talking to her and just interacting with the kids, hands-on learning and human interaction seem to be the best way for many of these kids to learn. Imitation and being able to see the concepts in their hands is probably a far better means of education than just a computer. However, I don't doubt that computer programs coupled with perhaps some sort of hardware controller and a human guide would be beneficial. Good luck to anyone who is helping anyone out with disabilities. Just being there to help works wonders on its own.

Write your own tools

[n1ywb]

From my experience, educational software is usually laughably simple, especially given the price. If you don't totally suck at teh programming, try writing some of your own tools for him and then work with him to refine them and target them towards his specific issues. It doesn't take a rocket scientist. Get a copy of perl/tk or something and start hacking.

Re:Write your own tools

[harry_dolan]

A few years ago I tried to find software to teach simple math to my autistic son. When the search failed I wrote my own open source program to do it. (First this old UNIX dog had to learn to program for Windows). I knew that lots of other nerds have autistic kids and I hoped that a few would jump in to contribute to the program. None ever did.

The program worked in its unrefined form and now my son is off learning more advanced things. So I'm done with the program. Still, I wish that the open source development model would have worked here.

Just curious

[jim_v2000]

What is a level 10 mental handicap?

Wild guess

[Fr05t]

Maybe FFX and FFX-2. Lots of spoken dialog with captions. Actually any TV that can show CC without having mute on might be good to try. I really don't know what else to tell you. Maybe looking into some adult reading eductation programs in your local area to see if they have any tips.

Re:Video-game related material

[Rei]

Video-game related material actually can help. My partner had problems breathing when she was born and suffered motor control damage in her brain (which led her to be epileptic ever since). While mentally she has always been rather intelligent, she was phyiscally slow, which led many of her classmates to assume that she was retarded; they picked on her a lot for it.

Based on advice, her parents encouraged her to play video games - especially Tetris - to help increase her coordination. Whether or not it was the cause, today she is about as coordinated as your average person (and can beat my socks off at Tetris, to boot! :) ).

Re:Video-game related material

[Rei]

When I was in elementary school, a test that they administered at school determined that I was typing around 800 words per minute.

Of course, that was largely because I figured out that, assuming that the final message you entered was correct, the algorithm counted the number of times you pressed the space bar. So, you just had to simply hold down the space bar, delete the line, hold down the space bar, etc, and then after several tries type in the correct message.