Educating Young Eyes (EYE) Project

Who are we?

Educating Young Eyes, led by Dr. Erdly, is a project that focuses on children near vision assessment and therapy using the latest modern technologies. We aim to develop effective screening and therapy tools that are easily accessible to schools and other parties and to increase awareness of the importance of functional vision in children’s learning. This project is based on existing research works on child near vision issues and their impacts, and touches on a variety of technical and non-technical topics, such as Game Design, Distributed Web Service, Architecture, Software Engineering, Education and Children Learning, Psychology, Social Justice, Law, … and more. WHY? Teachers and parents may not recognize why children cannot perform well in their studies. Sometimes, the reason is that they are not able to read properly.

This might be caused by near vision problems, such as ocular motor dysfunction, amblyopia, strabismus, convergence insufficiency, or others. When this happens, children may have headaches, fatigue, and other eyestrain problems. Unfortunately, 25% of all schoolchildren in the United States may have some form of near-vision problems undetected by regular eye exams. They see blurred, distorted, double vision, or words with no spaces.

What are we doing?

WHAT ARE WE DOING? We help increase awareness and provide access to all communities about the importance of functional vision in children’s learning. We also started many projects for research and experimentation, ranging from single-page survey web apps to well-polished mobile games. Here are some apps we created: 1. Alphabet Hero (Unity / Mobile) A mobile game that helps children improve their visual processing skills. This game was developed and polished based on various research on user interaction. 2. Near Vision Toolbox
(Unity / Mobile) A mobile app that is designed for school nurses to perform vision screening activities more accurately and efficiently, using a set of visual measurement methods and tools. 3. CISS Survey (Web / Mobile) CISS (Convergence Insufficiency Symptom Survey) is a web and mobile app that asks a set of questions to help quickly discover children who suffer from convergence insufficiency, an anomaly of the visual system. 4. Red Flags (Web / Mobile) A web and mobile app that presents simple activities that children can perform to detect vision problems that cannot be caught by traditional vision screening.

How to join?

Simple! If you are interested in our works, or related topics such as cloud computing, game design, and development, digital art, children’s research, social justice awareness, content development, etc., please send an email to one of the following contacts, and we will get in touch with you! Dr. William Erdly (Faculty Advisor, erdlyww@uw.edu) and Longfei Xi (Research Assistant, lxi@uw.edu)

Resources and additional content

The Center For Children’s Vision, Learning, and Technologies