It’s a bright morning in early May when I find myself in a classroom in Islington watching some teenagers play together on a couple of Xboxes. But this is no ordinary school and this is no ordinary Xbox.

The school in questions is the Richard Cloudesley Secondary School for pupils with physical disabilities and additional sensory needs. And the reason these four pupils are playing a games console in class because the school’s teachers have been experimenting with the Xbox Adaptive Controller, a controller designed by Microsoft to ensure that anyone with limited mobility can play on the Xbox.

In particular, the Xbox has been instrumental in improving the pupils’ communication and physical skills, as well as encouraging friendships alongside learning.

“I had to be convinced a little to see the benefits of it,” explains headteacher Francis Gonzalez. “But it’s a really authentic, meaningful and motivating context for learning.”

Here’s how the Xbox Adaptive Controller is having an impact at Richard Cloudesley and what it means for the children attending the school.

How the Xbox Adaptive Controller project started

The Xbox Adaptive Controller started as a Microsoft hackathon project back in 2015, after engineer Matt Hite saw a picture of a custom controller made by Warfighter Engaged, a non-profit that provides devices to wounded veterans. After undergoing different design iterations, the controller was released to the public last year.

What makes the Xbox Adaptive controller accessible The Xbox Adaptive controller allows those with limited mobility to connect their own buttons, joysticks and switches via 19 input jacks in so it mimics a standard controller For instance, gamers could add a button to accelerate a car in a driving game, or one to brake It has large programmable buttons that are light to press and can be remapped in the Xbox Accessories app Inside there is a rechargeable battery, which eliminates the need to change small batteries

The controller made its way to Richard Cloudesley as a result of the school's longstanding relationship with Hector Minto, a technical evangelist for accessibility at Microsoft. As the school often works with different forms of technology, such as using virtual reality headsets to prepare its pupils with autism for a trip to the dentist, Minto asked Gonzalez if the school would want to try the new tech out.

“What’s so exciting about this project is that it is the first piece of assistive technology specifically for people with disabilities that Microsoft has created,” Minto says. “Technology is in all of our lives – it’s critical that society digitally transforms to include everybody.”

Xbox in the classroom

The school has had Xbox consoles in the past which often the older boys would use at lunchtime. However, since February, the games console has been a part of the classroom in a pilot project with eight pupils.

During the weekly sessions, the pupils team up with one another and get to play different games such as Pegle and Forza Horizon 4, sometimes even Fortnite. Though they enjoy the fun aspects of it, the emphasis is on how play can help the pupils improve their communication skills and work towards their personal development goals. These goals may include things like peer-to-peer communication or using extended sentences explains Gonzalez.

“The difference the Xbox has made is in motivation. We’re able to now work on those goals for more extended periods of time,” he says. “There’s no way the kids would have been interested in hour-long sessions working on a specific skill, whereas with this it’s hard to keep them away.”

Bringing fun into the learning process is crucial, says Daniel Cooper, a speech and language therapist from Whittington Health, who works at the school. “When students want to play, the therapy isn’t arduous. We want them to communicate with their peers, we want them to push and stretch their physical skills. These therapy targets are easier to achieve when the students want to do them [in order] to participate in the gaming.”

The lessons learned through Xbox play

One thing that has been great to see, says Gonzalez, is the involvement of the female pupils, such as Safia who was in the classroom the day of my visit. The pupils themselves had to decide if they wanted to be a part of the project, it wasn’t dictated by the teaching staff, so it was encouraging to see the normally shy Safia put herself forward.

“Before this, Safia’s preference was to sit and read novels and to take herself away from the rest of the students. We tried other ways of getting her more involved in what’s going on around the school – particularly in social times,” says Gonzalez. “This has really brought her out of herself. And given her the confidence to tell [her partner] Jack off when she doesn’t think he’s doing what he should.”

It’s not just the secondary school pupils who get to play with the games console. The primary school runs sessions with the mainstream pupils to encourage them to work and play together. “We found sometimes there’s a bit of a barrier with the communication and we’ve been using the Xbox and the Accessibility Controller as a method to stimulate that conversation and create interaction,” explains primary teacher Ben Clements.

For instance, the pupils may be tasked with a driving game and a pupil from the mainstream school may be tasked with driving the car left and right, whilst a pupil from the Richard Cloudesley School may control forwards and backwards. “It puts that communication into the game. And it’s a really good opportunity to use to stimulate that conversation,” he adds.

The teaching staff have also seen improvements in the students’ physical abilities too. Safia’s partner Jack has been experimenting with using foot switches in order to play the different games.

“Normally he would have been tired after 20 minutes. Now, he will use it for an extended period of time,” says Gonzalez.

The impact of the project in schools and beyond

This has been a pilot project and now the school wants to see how it can extend into other aspects of teaching. The idea is that the teaching staff will create a plan to incorporate gaming into other aspects of the curriculum, for instance in English classes with an emphasis on the speaking and listening side of things.

Developments through play don’t just stay in school, it extends into the home as well. The parents of the pupils have been involved in the project, such as being invited into the classroom to say how it works in action.

“One parent was quite emotional and overwhelmed because one of the children was saying, ‘No, that’s not right!’. And she had never seen another child have that kind of expressive communication with her daughter before, it had always been very compliant or gone through an adult,” explains Gonzalez. “We’re seeing those friendships develop which is really lovely.”

Minto, Microsoft’s accessibility evangelist, is also listening to feedback from the school and will relay it back to Microsoft and in the hope that this will inform future accessibility strategies at the tech company. One comment which really stuck out for Minto was related to finding the right games for the pupils.

“I would love to see more games aimed at this audience,” says Minto. “Maybe we can start to see more variety in the Microsoft online store, and see a greater variety of games aimed at kids with varying requirements.”

Microsoft is already using the lessons it learned from creating the Xbox Adaptive Controller, particularly its inclusive packaging, to ensure inclusive design is factored into its future products so it looks like this isn’t the last we’ll see of the Adaptive Controller and the impact it’s having on the world.

And, for a select group of pupils in Islington, it looks to be making a world of difference already.