Seven-year-olds on crutches, and what they reminded me about inclusive design
This is a different kind of post. No cognitive load functions, no product survey, no Phase II roadmap. Just a morning at an elementary school, and a few things I’m still thinking about on the drive home.
Reed Elementary hosted the Bionic Project seminar this morning for its K through 2 classes. I went to watch. I left with notes I want to write down before they fade.
The Assembly
It started in the cafeteria with the whole K–2 group. The framing was straightforward and exactly right for the age: we have more in common than we don’t, allyship is something you practice, and bodies come in a lot of configurations. The presenters showed a few prosthetic devices. Kids leaned forward. Nobody made it weird. The room handled it the way rooms full of seven-year-olds usually handle new information — with more openness than most adult rooms manage.
There’s something worth noting in that. Adults reading research on inclusive design often start from a defensive crouch — am I going to say the wrong thing, am I allowed to ask, what’s the etiquette here. Kids don’t have that overhead yet. They just want to know how the prosthetic works.
The Drawing Exercise
After the assembly, the first graders broke off for a design exercise. Three scenario cards: a blind person, a wheelchair user, someone with a prosthetic. Their job was to design classrooms and playgrounds that would actually work for the person on their card.
This is the part where I started taking the project seriously as a piece of pedagogy. It is, in essence, user-centered design — the same discipline that gets formalized in graduate programs and design studios — being run with second graders. The cards forced them to think from a specific point of view rather than abstractly. The classroom-and-playground prompt grounded the thinking in a setting they actually understood. The share-out at the end did the rest.
I watched a kid draw a swing with handles instead of chains. I watched another kid draw a hallway with what was clearly meant to be a textured floor strip running down the middle. I have read white papers proposing approximately the same thing.
The Amputee Soccer
This was the part of the morning I will be thinking about for a while.
The second graders came into the gym for an amputee soccer demonstration. The presenters — Nico and Jovan are both members of the US National Amputee Soccer team— gave them a demonstration and then gave them all crutches. They ran them through basic drills and a mini penalty shootout, all on one leg with crutches as the second-leg surrogate.
What it did for the kids was hard to overstate. They went from I have heard there is a sport like this to I have spent four minutes trying to score on crutches and I now have an actual physical sense of what that takes. That gap — between hearing about something and feeling it in your body — is the gap that most well-meaning awareness programming never closes.
The penalty shootout in particular was a small piece of brilliance. It’s a game with an obvious goal, immediate feedback, social stakes, and just enough difficulty on crutches to be humbling without being demoralizing. The kids loved it. They were also, without anyone needing to lecture, quietly absorbing what it means to play a game with different equipment.
What I’m Sitting With
A few open questions:
The amputee soccer demo worked because it was a real activity with a real game state, not a simulation. The drawing exercise worked because it had a real prompt with real constraints. What’s the equivalent for visual impairment? A blindfold-and-walking-stick demo is the obvious answer and also, I think, the wrong one — it produces a few seconds of disoriented stumbling and then the kid takes the blindfold off and the lesson evaporates. We need something with the structure of the penalty shootout: a clear goal, immediate feedback, real stakes, fun.
I don’t have it yet.
Also: this kind of programming should not be rare. Reed pulled it off because the Bionic project exists, the school made room in the schedule, and somebody with a budget said yes. That’s not a model that scales by accident. It scales because somebody decides it’s important enough to make happen, repeatedly, in more places.
That’s the whole post. Field notes, a little gratitude, and one design problem I’d like to crack
Thanks to Nico and Jovan and the entire Bionic team, the teachers at Reed Elementary, and every kid who tried to score on crutches this morning.
This post is part of an ongoing research series at runlikeafish.blog exploring biomimetic approaches to assistive technology for visually impaired runners. If you’re a visually impaired runner, a guide, or a researcher working in this space, I’d love to hear from you. You can reach me at brooke@runlikeafish.blog