A University-Landscape Architect Collaboration to Develop an Augmentative and Alternative Communication (AAC) Board for a City Park Playground: A Full Report of its Design
Bibliographic record
Abstract
In this report, we detail the development of an AAC board for a community playground situated in a large park in the heart of Waterloo, Ontario, Canada. AAC boards for community locations have received much less attention and study than AAC tools intended for individual use at home and/or in schools, or by children on school playgrounds. This AAC board was developed through an ongoing collaboration between the landscape architect redeveloping the playground for the city and a professor of developmental psychology with expertise in children’s early social pragmatic communication, along with her students at the University of Waterloo. For this AAC board, we prioritized practical communication in a playground context by adopting an activity-focused approach. We describe the major steps taken in developing the AAC board and explain the reasoning and empirical support that guided our content and design decisions. These included choices about the vocabulary included, the symbols used and developed, and the positioning of all components on the board. We also considered symbol and border colours to support accessibility and ease of use. In this process, we sourced empirical evidence from many domains, including speech-language pathology, AAC, and language and cognitive development within developmental psychology. We also trialled a draft version of the AAC board in the park and made revisions based on feedback from children and their parents. We considered novel factors our expertise suggested would be relevant, such as the age and height of children and the vertical position of symbols on the board, and we introduced some novel elements such as a colour wheel. We conclude by outlining limitations and recent developments by manufacturers that may improve the design and use of playground AAC boards. We also highlight areas for further research that might be particularly helpful. We have prioritized sharing all aspects of our work openly so that it can be easily accessed, used, and shared by others without restrictions.
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How this classification was reachedexpand
Full frame machine prediction
Teacher imitationNot calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. The Gemma side is a direct model label for every work in the frame, read from the title-only record. The Codex side is a classifier learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and calibrated to design-weighted sample rates; fields without enough sample support carry no Codex call. Candidate is the union of the two sides; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels.
Distilled classifier scores by category (both heads)
| Category | Codex | Gemma |
|---|---|---|
| Metaresearch | 0.008 | 0.008 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.000 | 0.001 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.002 | 0.001 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.004 | 0.002 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.003 | 0.002 |
| Open science | 0.002 | 0.004 |
| Research integrity | 0.001 | 0.002 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.019 | 0.004 |
Machine scores (provisional)
The two teacher heads of the student model, read on this work. A score orders the frame for review; it never asserts a category, and the validation status ships verbatim with every row.
Baseline scores from an immature model (maturity gate not passed, 7 training rounds). Scores rank; they never assert a category.
score_only:v0-immature-baseline · verbatim from the scoring run: score_only means the number may rank works, and no category label ships from itClassification
machine, unvalidatedMachine predicted; a candidate call from one source (direct Gemma or distilled Codex), not a consensus.
How this classification was reached, model by model and score by score, is at the end of the page under "How this classification was reached".