STEP and Microsoft collaborate on a program for children with learning differences

Toby Bradshaw of the Developer Experience Team at Microsoft has reached out to work with Conor Davey, founder of STEP on a new program tailored towards children with learning differences. The program, dubbed STEPtoday, works with children with learning differences and difficulties in the US and the UK through focused movement.

STEPtoday is a personalized program set up for children to improve learning, behavior, attention. Most common students are seven years old and above and exhibit the symptoms associated with dyslexia, dyspraxia, and ADHD. It uses physical exercise to stimulate the child’s cerebellum and help them absorb information easier. The movements are balanced, focus, and repetitive over a long period of time. The program, which can take over a year to complete, has had significant success in the active children, both academically and mentally.

That success depends ultimately on the accuracy and compliance of the student in question. For the last 2-3 years, Microsoft has been collaborating with STEP to enhance the software that children use with the program.

This isn’t the first time that Microsoft has reached out to change the world with new technology. Recently we’ve seen examples of Microsoft Cloud improving global economy by bringing banking to remote locations in the world. As Liam Kelly, Board member of Microsoft UK said:

“Microsoft empowers people and organizations to achieve more in entirely new ways; to teach and learn through exploration and to adapt to individual learning needs. I am excited to see how emerging technologies can be used to help people in ways we have never imagined. Innovations in technology have the potential to make learning fun and engaging and can lead to the learning process being an even more rewarding experience”

With Microsoft’s partnership and increasingly innovative technology, Davey has set new goals for the program’s software to be able to measure movements with better results. Monitoring, capturing, and scoring the exercises will help each child in the program perfect their performance to achieve better results. Ultimately, his hopes are to increase the success rate of children that join the STEPtoday program and change their lives for the better.