By Breanna Bowman
Courtney Johnson was born deaf. At the age of 2, she finally had a successful surgery that gave her hearing.
As a child she received speech and hearing intervention and rehabilitation to learn how to produce speech sounds and tolerate auditory signals. By the age of 3 Johnson was able to fully communicate.
"God must've known I wanted to be a speech pathologist" said Johnson, a senior.
During her last year as a Monarch, Johnson is working closely on Grammar Cat, a project spearheaded by Dr. Anne M.P. Michalek. Michalek is an assistant professor in the communication disorders and special education department in the Darden College of Education and Professional Studies at Old Dominion University. The two are developing a mobile gaming app for students to use in the classroom to facilitate accurate identification and coding of grammatical categories or parts of speech.
"Language sampling is necessary to diagnose and treat a wide variety of disorders," said Michalek. "As a speech pathologist you need to be able to analyze sentences on multiple levels and one of the ways is through identifying grammatical categories."
Over the past eight months, Michalek and Johnson have been tirelessly working, developing, and coding over 100 sentences to input into the application. The idea, said Michalek, was born from a design thinking and gaming workshop hosted by her college colleague, Dr. Karen Sanzo, associate professor in the department of educational foundations and leadership.
After the workshop, Michalek met with Dr. Kevin Moberly, associate professor in the Batten College of Arts and Letters, who provided insight into effective gaming design. Then, she connected with Michael Ruffin, director of innovative technology in Darden College and Karthik Navuluri, assistant director of web, portal & mobile for Information Technology Services. Ruffin and Navuluri quickly agreed to collaborate and support Michalek in the endeavor to make the gaming app a reality.
"The goal of Grammar Cat is to help build the foundation for a really important clinical skill that all successful speech pathologists must have," said Michalek. She is not aware of any mobile app that teaches and reinforces students' ability to identify grammatical categories.
Johnson said it has been extremely rewarding to work on the project with her professor and create something that could be used in her field of study.
"Through this gaming app we are going to be giving motivation to kids that really want to learn," she said.
According to Michalek, she plans to launch the gaming app to a group of students enrolled in an undergraduate speech-language pathology course this fall. Once the prototyping phase is complete, the creation team plans to seek external funding in order to launch this program to contribute to higher education communication science and disorder programs and K-12 English teachers.