Regular readers will know that Mark and I have developed a technology we call Dream-Racer that can be used by children and young adults that have physical disabilities or loss of limbs. Dream-Racer enables users to "drive" a scale model racing car in a similar way that an able-bodied person would using a hand held joystick.

If this is the first time you have come across this blog and would like to know more you could jump to the first post by clicking here or here if you want to skip back a few entries to get the gist of how Dream-Racer works.

Before Christmas I said that I had taken one of the Dream-Racer demo rigs to a school in Shropshire. A week later I went along to collect it and, I must admit, I was eager to hear how they had got on with it.

Well, first of all, I would like to say thanks to Gill Flannery and Pete Smith for being so welcoming and willing to have a go with Dream-Racer. But, most of all, a special thanks to the students that tried it out.

Overley Hall School

I've taken this text from the home page of the Overly Hall School web site.

"Overley Hall is a co-educational, independent, residential Special School offering education and care for children with Severe Learning Difficulties, Autism, Epilepsy and associated challenging behaviours.

The age range of the children is from nine to nineteen years. Children may join the School at any age within the age group. All the children at Overley have statements of Special Educational Need.

The catchment area served by the School is the whole of the UK. Overley Hall offers a new beginning and support for children and young adults, whose educational, managerial, social, emotional and behavioural needs can best be met by residential, special education."

If you would like to know more about Overley Hall School take a look at their web site by clicking here. Based on my experience the staff are very friendly and open to new ideas.

The feedback

Overall, not bad. The equipment survived well and was still in one piece when I took it back the base. The students had found it fun although difficult to fully grasp how to control the car. Discussing this with Pete, he felt that the car was probably moving too fast for most of the students and it may be better if we used a slower one.  Secondly, a car that could be controlled on a fixed track would be useful for some students.  Excellent feedback: something we will take into consideration in future designs.

The speed issue we are able to address immediately. Using one or two dummy batteries in the car alongside the regular AA's slows it considerably and makes it more controllable.

Many thanks to Gill and Pete and their students for giving Dream-Racer a test drive and their positive feedback.

Mike  

I collected the first of our Dream-Racer caps today complete with the embroidered logo and they look good. Take a look at the pictures in the photo album.

We had a bit of a debate over which colours, font and letter sizing to use at first. I even went to the extent of mocking up some labels in Adobe Photoshop, sticking them to the hat and photographing them to see how they looked.

In the end the specialists at Smart took charge and suggested Dream-Racer embroidered in gold or sky coloured thread would look good on the navy cap and changing the font to one called "speedy" would work better. And they were right!

Even better, Muna Dilling at Smart said if I brought two caps in on Saturday morning they would set-up the pattern in the computer and embroider them for me while I waited. One hour later I walked out of the shop with the finished job. Not bad service just one week before Christmas.

 So, continuing to sing their praises, if you need an embroidery job doing on your school uniform, workwear, or something you want personalising I suggest you get in touch with Smart. You can find their workshop in the Barracks, Newcastle-Under-Lyme, West Midlands.

On Monday I'll be collecting the demo rig from the special needs school that borrowed it earlier this week. They will have had it for about a week and I'm looking forward to hearing how they got on with it - more on this next week.

Mike

Regular readers of this blog will know that Dream-Racer is toy for disabled children. For the benefit of new readers, Dream-Racer technology enables children with physical disabilities to "drive" a radio controlled scale model racing car using simple head movements instead of using a hand-controlled joystick. 

Over the last few weeks the Dream-Racer web site has been taking shape and it's now time to move it from the trial server into the real world.  Steve Ashdown at Phoot Creative is going to host the site alongside my other e-commerce business Opulus Gifts.

Choosing the e-commerce software was easy.  The Opulus Gifts site is built with Actinic Catalog and, rather than hunt around for something new, it was an easy decision to use Actinic for the Dream-Racer site as well.  All being well the site should be up and running in early January.

Getting a project like Dream-Racer ready for the commercial launch is a time consuming process. But, we have now finalised the source of caps, Geoff at Nikko Toys helped Mark with some of the critical electronic components he needed, we purchased our first consignment of printed circuit boards, we found a company that can produce the cap liners, etc., etc.

And the big news is ...

The first demo rig is with a special needs school in Shropshire. I took it along earlier this week and left it with them for the children to play with. At this stage we are looking for feedback - hopefully positive but even some of the other type will be helpful as well. I'll write about this next week.

Take note, if you are a teacher at a special needs school for disabled children and would like to try one of our demo units in your school get in touch.  Call 08707 117153 or e-mail me at: michael@dream-racer.com

Mike