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On May 11th, The Calais School was recognized by the New Jersey School Boards Association (NJSBA) and ASAH for its innovative Twice Exceptional Gifted and Talented Program in technology. The program allows students grades 7 through 12 Plus to work together on creating an app that will eventually be used by the entire Calais School community.
The Calais School was honored to be recognized along with only nine other New Jersey Schools for innovative instructional programming at the “Innovations in Special Education” Awards luncheon in Princeton. The ceremony was part of Special Education Week, a New Jersey education tradition since 1985. In this year’s Special Education Week Proclamation, Governor Chris Christie called upon the people of New Jersey to “recognize the achievements of New Jersey’s special education students and the outstanding contributions made by educators, school board members, schools and agencies for the disabled, and their parents.”
The Twice Exceptional Program at The Calais School is a groundbreaking opportunity for students with special needs, who often excel at video games and technology while they are challenged socially or emotionally. At The Calais School we have recognized our students’ unique talents and are striving to give them real-world skills in competitive and emerging industries such as video game and app design.
The program cultivates the strengths of our students by developing programming skills using professional-grade app design software suite. Students use an innovative online course from Youth Digital, which is geared toward middle and high school students and teaches app design in a fun and interactive way. The course teaches students the basics of app and game development using the program Clickteam Fusion 2. The program guides students through the process of creating a game similar to the popular iOS game Angry Birds.
All aspects of the game, including sound effects, background design, level design, the behavior of obstacles and hazards have been programmed by students. As students have found out, designing a game is not as easy as placing enemies and hero characters on a background. In order to make the game function, behind the scenes programming rules have to be identified and created. The real work comes into play when students are taught the basics of programming by using simple if-then statements such as, “if the hero collides with an enemy, then the enemy is destroyed.” The App Design 1 course has built-in quizzes that are used to evaluate students as well as troubleshooting scenarios where students must fix a broken version of their app.
The students currently enrolled in the Twice Exceptional Program range from grades 7 to 12 Plus. This range of ages has allowed for a peer mentoring environment as they cooperatively develop a fully-functional app. We are excited to expand the program beyond technology. We have seen its success throughout the 2014-2015 school year and will expand the program in the future to offer students gifted in language arts, music, and art a Twice Exceptional Program that will cultivate these talents and encourage personal growth.
