About
Grapevine Minds is a website that provides literary resources for children on the spectrum and their caregivers. It consists of an interactive online book and a metaphor-learning program, both geared toward elementary-aged children. The book, titled “It’s My Birthday!”, contains various interactive features that target general areas of cognitive challenges in children on the spectrum. The metaphor-learning program is an interactive experience during which children can construct thinking maps to better understand metaphors, and even create metaphors of their own. As the name suggests, this website is designed to help the children grow various mental connections and richly explore the world around them through a literary perspective.
About The Founder
Jean Chun is currently a rising senior from Deerfield, Massachusetts. As a writer, she took an early interest in the science behind language processing, and took an undergraduate-level linguistics course from the Washington University in St. Louis her sophomore summer. While exploring her love for languages, she discovered her passion for helping people with special needs access an enriched literary experience. That year, she volunteered at Whole Children, a school in Hadley for people of various abilities. During this gratifying yet humbling experience, she discovered her curiosity for how she might make reading more fun for individuals on the spectrum. She subsequently dove into months-long research on ASD, from its behavioral symptoms to areas of general cognitive challenges. Upon discovering that children on the spectrum often have a hard time reading, particularly owing to difficulties in metaphor processing, she decided to create an online book with specifically designed interventions, as well as a program that draws from study-proven methods of improving metaphorical understanding in children on the spectrum. She thanks her coding instructor for helping her turn her ideas and designs for Metaphor Fun! into code, and teaching her the fundamental knowledge for building such coding-based programs.