Dyscalculia is not a well-known disability, which means that people who experience it have limited help. Jay Hatcher aims to change that.
Dyscalculia affects a person’s ability to work with numbers and do math. Hatcher, a software engineer for HDI, is developing an app called Ucalculia, which aims to provide a resource for people with dyscalculia that will help them make sense of numbers and equations.
“I’ve been working on that for about a year and doing a lot of interviews and other resource gathering to understand it better, to be able to provide a tool that’s going to be effective at helping people who deal with this for children and adults,” Hatcher said.
Often, people with dyscalculia struggle to hold onto mathematical information as they’re working with it. A big part of Ucalculia is to give its users a way to better track that information.
“You can put down numbers and then manipulate them. Any addition or subtraction or other operations you put in, the computer keeps track of what you’re doing,” Hatcher said. “It doesn’t solve it for you, but if you would do eleven minus five, then if you change the eleven to a ten, it will automatically subtract one from the five as well, maintaining the answer of 6. It’ll keep the relationship the same. When you manipulate the numbers in that way, you can solve the problem somewhat in the way you would do it in your head, but on the screen.”
For Hatcher, this project started as a little bit of an experiment to see how he could use computers to help increase accessibility. He fell upon dyscalculia because as a disability that affects people’s computational processes, it seemed like a natural fit. Since few resources exist to help people with dyscalculia, he also reasoned that a strong, well-designed tool would be of great help to an underserved population.
“I didn’t know it existed until I stumbled upon it,” he said. “I’ve heard an estimate that it’s about 50 years behind dyslexia in terms of research and funding…It’s a real need that’s being overlooked in a large population. The existing data suggests that it’s about as common as dyslexia is.”
In the process, he’s appreciated the opportunity to learn more about a disability that is less well-known. The proTitcess of creating Ucalculia has involved a lot more preliminary research than he expected, but it was work he enjoyed.
“It’s been really fun to learn about this. I’ve done a bunch of interviews with people that are researching it, people that have it, people whose kids have it. People over in England and New Zealand, here in the States, in different parts of the world that are all trying to do what they can to understand this better and address it in different ways,” he said. “It’s been really illuminating both what people have tried and how amazing their creativity can be, and also how not well understood this condition is.”
Currently, Hatcher is making final adjustments to the app. He hopes to enter the beta testing phase by December.
