Involvement and Engagement
Over the course the DCD Project, which ran from April-October 2021, we have performed a range of outreach and involvement activites across different groups and communities. This project has now evolved into an ongoing effort to continue researching and engaging with the DCD/Dyspraxia Communities. Please find some of the achievements and activities we've conducted below, and keep an eye on this page for further updates!
If you'd like to hear more or if you'd like to get involved in some capactiy, please get in touch with one of our researchers using the details on the Contact Us page.
Raising Awareness of DCD
The DCD Project represented an excellent opportunity to spread the word about DCD. We worked with an animator to create a 2-minute information video aimed at primary schools, to help raise awarness of DCD.
During Dyspraxia Awareness Week (10th-16th October 2021), we sent a huge number of emails and phone calls to local schools, councillors, MPs, charities and organisations to try and push for a better community-wide understanding of DCD/Dyspraxia.
We managed to contact over 60 schools across the Southwest, and our work drew the attention of several Members of Parliament: Ben Bradshaw of Exeter, Emma Lewell-Buck of South Shields, and Tom Hunt of Ipswich have all viewed and retweeted the video on Twitter!
Our PhD student, Jack, also featured on BBC Radio Devon to talk about Dyspraxia/Developmental Coodination Disorder and what it means for people.
What do stakeholders want to see from research?
We got in touch and chatted to people across the DCD community. This included children with DCD, adults with DCD, parents/guardians of children with DCD, Special Educational Needs Coordinators (SENCos), clinicians (Occupational Therapists etc) and teachers. We continue to be interested in hearing what people in the community think we should be researching.
To this end, we invited people to take part in one-to-one interviews, followed by group-based workshops with combinations of people with lived experience of DCD. We had some fantastic conversations and responses with these groups!
We also held a number of anonymous online surveys and questionnaires, to help us understand what the wider DCD community think we should be focussing on. We created some fantastic word clouds out of these responses, which can be seen dotted around the site!
Assessing the feasibility of Virtual Reality and diagnosis
Immersive virtual reality technologies, such as the Oculus Quest, offer a novel way to measure sensorimotor skills remotely and in a precise fashion. They also allow for sporting and other motor skills to be practiced in a safe environment.
We've been chatting to people in the DCD community about the feasibility of using VR as a gaming and assessment device. We sent out VR headsets to dyspraxic children and adults for them to try out and to play with for 2 weeks. After this 2 week period, we hosted focus groups with other adults, children and their parents about their views on the potential use of this technology.
Our Outcomes
We're currently writing up our outcomes from these acitivites, which will posted on here shortly!
