Ohio University Lancaster students are reaching out to elementary, middle and high school deaf students from Virginia to North Dakota and right here in Ohio.
            They are connecting through board games created to teach deaf history and culture, sentence structure, and even math word problems. All of the games - complete with cards, dice, timers, spinners and instructions - will be shipped to schools contacted by students in Becky Brooks’ and Lorraine Rogers’ American Sign Language III classes.

            First students chose the demographics of their audience. And, queried Brooks, Hearing, Speech and Language Instructor. “Do they want to work with a residential (school for the deaf) or a mainstream setting?” She distributed idea forms, contact forms, and game development forms, and students began contacting schools to assure that teachers would accept the games. Some students e-mailed the teachers to determine their students’ needs and others consulted with ASL linguists. Then the students decided the objective of each game.
            As she offered ideas, Brooks noted that deaf children struggle with word problems. “And there are not many games geared to deaf culture and history.”
            “Math Stack,” developed for elementary students by Jaime Bruner and Jennifer Seifert, is, in a way, going home. Their word problem-solving game will go to the North Dakota School for the Deaf, where Bruner’s grandfather, Jesse, was a professor in 1952. The game features a range of addition and subtraction word problems, a farm theme complete with haystack and pitchfork cards, and extra animals for use as manipulatives because deaf children are visual and tactile learners. “We thought the theme geographically fit in with North Dakota,” Bruner said.
            “Deaf Trivia Now!” targets middle school students with its history timeline. For creators Abbie Dandurand and Dana DeHays, the most difficult task was fact finding. “Much of what I found was opinion. I tried to find ten questions every day, so the game wouldn’t be too short,” Dandurand explained. Their game was developed for the Illinois School for the Deaf.
            The ASL students used spread sheets and colorful graphics to create the game layouts and mounted them on game boards, and included notebooks, carrying cases, and even graphics on flash drives so that teachers can create more cards and more questions.
            On ‘game day’ the students played each other’s games, critiqued each game, requested feedback and made notes for changes. The refined and laminated games were submitted to Brooks and Rogers, who, along with members of the deaf community, used a rubric to score the assignment.