There is fun in learning complex skills — you just have to know where to look.
So says Mike Berube, the brains behind a fledging robotics club at the Ron Joyce Children’s Health Centre where young patients with special needs are gaining practical motor skills through fun, tech-driven activities.
The volunteer-led club sees youth from as young as five to as old as 18 come together every Saturday to custom-build toys rooted in social engagement and critical thinking, from Lego robots and remote-control cars to drones and virtual reality.
“It’s basically like teaching a kid math and actually having them smile while they’re doing it,” said a chuckling Berube, who has a licence in mechatronics, a trade that combines electronics with mechanical engineering.
“It’s amazing how much they actually pick up what we teach them, and that’s because they’re working at their own speeds and designing these robots for fun.”
Berube, 40, pitched the idea for the club to Ron Joyce staff in 2019, a year after his daughter, Petra, had been an outpatient at the hospital’s development rehabilitation wing.
The eight-year-old was born with a genetic condition in which part of one of her chromosomes was missing. She’s non-verbal and has difficulty with her gross motor skills, which use large muscles in the body for balance, co-ordination, and big movements like jumping and climbing.
“A lot of it was just paying back to the system that she and our family has received so much from over the years,” said Berube.
The half-dozen initial club participants met virtually for two years because of COVID restrictions, first learning how to code instructions into Spheros (mobile polycarbonate balls) before graduating to remote control cars and drones.
Berube personally retrofitted the fleet of eight cars to tailor them to the cognitive limitations of participants. He changed their suspension so they could survive crashes, increased their motors so they could drive over grass and put cameras in them so kids could remotely see where they were going.
“We had kids in wheelchairs who were literally ripping them through forests and everything,” he said. “There was no boundaries.”
The emphasis behind modifying the cars was to ensure kids weren’t put off by something like a crash.
“Because that’s the last thing you want,” Berube said. “If you tell a kid push it all the way, explore your boundaries, and then they break it, you just turn them off of the idea.”
But learning from mishaps is often key to successful coding — you hash out individual kinks before you see full body of work come to life.
And the same follows for kids who suffer from fine motor skills, who require more patience in their decision-making, said Lindsay Bray, clinical leader of development pediatrics and rehabilitation at Ron Joyce.
“Mike and the therapeutic team are able to break down skills in a way that kids can follow along,” she said. “The biggest thing they do is pay really close attention to (coding) sequences.
“It might be as small as two things in a row, but odds are it’s not going to work the first time. So we have to figure out what it is we need to fix, which is a really nice way to frame issues for our kids, because we want to start problem solving.”
Besides gaining cognitive skills, the club also allows kids to feel like kids, she added. Consider the participants in wheelchairs who typically lack access to places such as playgrounds and parks.
“It’s been so beneficial for them to be able to explore those places by using remote-control cars and drones equipped with cameras and goggles,” said Bray.
And for Berube, that’s the whole idea for the club — to give kids experiences they wouldn’t otherwise have.
“It’s about opening up the world for them and showing them they can do the same things other kids can do,” he said.
Source: https://www.thespec.com/news/hamilton-region/2022/06/24/coding-drones-special-needs.html