Bridge College celebrates Learning Disability Week

Learning Disability Week is an opportunity to make sure the world hears about what life is like when you have a learning disability. This year’s theme was ‘Living life with a learning disability.’ You can find out more information about it on the Mencap website.

We want to focus on how people with a learning disability are reconnecting with friends and their communities. So, as part of Learning Disability Week, we thought it would be great to share news about, Bridge College’s Gaming Club. It’s a fantastic club that’s bringing students together with their friends to share some ‘downtime’ during a busy day of college.

Bridge College facilitates many extracurricular activities every day. When the pandemic hit, like all colleges, these stopped. This negativity impacted the students and the opportunities to socialise and make friends.

This academic year, Gaming Club resumed. This time even bigger and better. Bridge College recognised that it was a great opportunity for students across the college to participate and engage in a shared passion. It also provides a great space to develop new skills, such as, learning how to use new technologies, hand-eye coordination, logical thinking, building creativity and strategising. Most importantly, students gained a moment during their day to have some fun.

Students from the Supported Internship programme created a Gaming Club film and a poster to promote the club to the wider college. Learners from other groups help to set up and pack away the club. The club has really helped to bring different groups across the college together.

The students have been able to play games together, competitively, and cooperatively, and have been able to access totally new gaming platforms to them, including a GameCube and VR headsets.

The Virtual Reality headsets allow students to engage in activities they may not otherwise get the chance to, for example, a music festival, a safari and petting a dinosaur. As Gaming Club develops, we hope to get more equipment so that more games are accessible to everyone, including a steering wheel and switch accessible games.  

Bridge College students have really reconnected with their peers over the last few months through the power of gaming.