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In Turkey the number of people with disabilities is approximately 8,5 million (ÖZİDA 2002). 3,5 million of them are consisted of children and they require special education (PEKUSLU&KAYACI,2007). If those children are considered as if they had a family which has got at least 2 members, the number of individuals who are affected by it primarily reach at least 10,5 milllion. This number goes up by higher amounts when the stuff taking care of these children such as educater, sanitarian etc has been taken into consideration. It can clearly be seen how much special education is important even looking from this perspective.Children with special needs have limited attention span and their attention can easily be distracted. They have difficulty in understanding words or concepts. The studies Show that computer assisted learning increases the motivation level of disabled students and it enables them to increase their attention span so that they enjoy studying. Also the studies comparing the contents of traditional education programs and computer assisted program shows that computer assisted programs are more effective in learning process of children with special needs. With the help of Computer Assisted Programs, disabled children can become active members of society who can sustain a social and occupational life independently. Blue Platform is a complete free of charge platform that is available for all children with special needs, their parents and their teachers. Target audience of this project are the individuals with special needs, the ones with medium-heavy mental deficiency and the ones with autism spectrum disorder. In 2018 National Ministry of Education renovated the curriculum of individuals with medium-heavy mental deficiency and autism spectrum disorder. Blue Platform has been designed according to this new curricula. Blue Platform includes the targets of levels and syllabus on the list down below.Level 1: Maths, Reading and Writing Skills, Social Skills, Social StudiesLevel 2: Maths, Reading and Writing Skills, Social Skills, Daily Life SkillsLevel 3: Maths, Reading and Writing Skills, Communication and Social Skills, Independent Living SkillsThe main goal of Blue Platform is to make a contribution to the equality of opportunity in special education. Blue Platform is totally free of charge and will always remain free of charge. IMPARK, one of the partner institutions which has built the engineering sytem of our project stated that they would carry on saving the system on their servers as long as the company exist. This statement added priceless value to the project in term of sustainability and upgradablity.Blue Platform is designed for being used as a supplementary material. The way how you use it is very simple. Pupils can use it with the help of their teachers or parents an deven by themselves in an easy way. Blue Platform is a web based Learning Management System (LMS). It does not require set-up. It is available on every smarts board or computer with internet connection. Training screens starts with learning section and after that part it carries on with the reinforcement part. After they cover the lessons, some reinforcement tools such as games, songs, animations, stories etc. that are to achieve the goals of the lessons appear on the screen. There are school module, teacher module and parent module sections.Intellectual Outputs:O1/Blue Special LMS: The first intellectual output of the project, LMS, is the core of Blue Platform.O2/Learning Contents: The learning contents of Blue Platform that engineering studies has been carried out in the previous output, have been prepared in O2 part.O3/Preparing Animations for Educational Objectives: Animation added to Blue Platform has been prepared on O3 intellectual output. It is not only limited with animations, plenty of videos were also prepared.O4/Preparing Games for Educational Objectives: Assistive technology in the field of education opens greater opportunities for disabled children to become fully active members in learning period. Didactic computer games are also one of them. Games being added to Blue Platform has been prepared on O4. O5/Vocalizations: Vocalizations of Blue Platform has been done on O5.Pilot scheme of Blue Platform has started on 28th May 2018 with the participation of more than 70 special education teachers from 20 different cities. With the help of feedbacks received from the teachers, optimizations and refinements have been done. All the results of survey on pilot scheme are available on official website of our project.Under the theme of Universal Design in Information Technologies, BİLTEVT2019, the International Barrier-Free Informatics Congress held on between 11-13th September 2019 with inter-institutional cooperation hosted by Maltepe University. Blue Platform was granted Barrier-Free Informatics Award. For being our first award really precious to us, it gave much more determination to work on our project.
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