Building a Personalized Diagnostics Package
Building a personalized diagnostics study package requires dedication -- not to mention the science of skills and a lot of work.
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The diagnostics package is a system that provides diagnostics study and omputer-assisted, group-based training of skills: It involves:
To build such a package you need funds. If you can't handle the costs yourself, you might prepare grant proposals and send them off to appropriate federal agencies or foundations. The format and content of the grants must conform to the requirements of the grantors. This is not to be taken lightly, so extreme care is needed in preparation.
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This site draws on the powerful hunting model to build its games and training programs. Trajectories of all kinds are fundamental and are to be seen in the light of their natural contexts. Targets are to be reached and dealt with in some fashion. And of course tracking is necessary to keep tabs of them. An obvious example is the use of guns and bullets and animal or human targets. Tennis is a little less but still obvious case in point, the ball itself being the bullet and the racket being the gun. Other sports can be seen in a similar vein. And don't ignore the stock market -- you track prices and perhaps make a purchase. The price at the ultimate trade is even called the strike price. Target shooting occurs in one or another skill-identifying context.
To understand what I mean by the skills context, consider the context of tennis. First, the tennis court alone is not tennis. An empty court is just a slab of concrete (or some other such material) with a net of a specific kind strung across its midsection. And if there were no people around, it wouldn't even be that much (a "court" is a human percept, so without perception there is no tennis).
The context of tennis is established by the objective nature of the court as well as by our presence in it, together with our perception of it, which determines its subjective nature for us individually. The context identifies what is or isn’t possible for us to do, tennis wise. Both physical and personal characteristics bear on what can happen. Both factors combine to make certain actions possible, and both put strict limits on the possibilities. The possibilities themselves show up as the set of all trajectories that fit the court. So we have to look closely at both characteristics to learn what information they generate. It is only by means of this information that we can know them. Similar defining statements can be made for trajectories (motions, movements, skills) in other contexts. In each setting, too, both objective and subjective factors guide and control what can occur.
To have tennis you need players (the perceivers), and you need tennis rackets and a tennis ball. Not just any racket is acceptable and not just any ball will do. You wouldn’t think of playing tennis with a squash racket, for instance, or with a baseball bat. And certainly not with a kitchen spoon -- even a large one. The squash racket is too light to hit a tennis ball properly over the net. A bat is entirely inappropriate. And a kitchen spoon is ridiculous.
The point is, the components of the context have to fit together and have to match the interpretation of the situation and the behavior it implies. In tennis you need people using the rackets to hit the ball back and forth across the net in accordance with the written and unwritten rules of the game. The tennis context is the social entity that includes the court and the equipment and the rules and the players. It is an arrangement (like many others) created by us to engage in a specific form of recreation and competition. The context of tennis means nothing to your neighborhood cat or dog. It means nothing even to the cat lying asleep in the middle of the service zone. It matters only to those of us, humans alike, who wish to participate in this form of recreation and "friendly" competition.
Because of its inherent nature (as specified by humans), the tennis context, like any other (formal or informal) arrangement, imposes various conditions on its participants – self-imposed, culturally acceptable conditions. The setting allows for a variety of tennis possibilities and also imposes constraints on what is allowed to occur. The size of the court, its shape and surface texture, and the size and shape of the net strung across its middle admit to only a certain kind of action. The size, shape, structure, and weight of the rackets and the ball contribute to the possibilities and constraints. And so too do the height, reach, and speed of each of the players, as well as the player’s physiological structure (which cats or dogs don’t share).
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Building the package calls for a number of tasks to be performed. Among them are:
As an example of a completed package, consider my Select 'n Shoot tennis tutorial target-shooting games.
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