Serious games assisted by playware as a way to improve socio-emotional skills in children with autism spectrum disorder

This paper presents a project developed with the aim of promoting emotional skills in children with Autism Spectrum Disorders (ASD). The project involves a serious game and a playware object, which is a physical component that allows the user to interactively play the serious game. The playware object has six buttons, each one showing an emoji with a specific facial expression and communicates via Bluetooth with the serious game app installed in an Android device. The facial expressions used are: happiness, sadness, fear, anger, surprise and neutral/normal. They were applied to the three game activities (imitation, recognition and storytelling). The chain of tests started with an online questionnaire to validate the avatars created to represent the previously mentioned facial expressions in the game, which was followed by a usability test of the application (serious game and playware object) with six typically developing children. Finally, the three game activities were tested with six children with ASD in three/four sessions. Due to the small test group and reduced number of sessions, the primary objective was to assess if the target group accepted the application. In fact, it had a high level of approval regarding both the serious game and the playware object. had a high level of approval regarding both the serious game and the playware object.COMPETE: POCI-01-0145-FEDER-007043 and FCT –Fundação para a Ciência e Tecnologia within the Project Scope: UID/CEC/00319/2013. Vinicius Silva also thanks FCT for the PhD scholarship SFRH/BD/SFRH/BD/133314/2017. The authors thank the teachers and students of the Elementary School of Gualtar (EB1/JI Gualtar) in Braga for the participation in the testsinfo:eu-repo/semantics/publishedVersio

Toward emotional interactive videogames for children with autism spectrum disorder

Technology and videogames have been proven as motivating tools for working attention and complex communication skills, especially in children with autism spectrum disorder (ASD). In this work, we present two experiences that used interactive games for promoting communication and attention. The first game considers emotions in order to measure children’s attention, concentration and satisfaction, while the second uses tangible tabletops for fostering cognitive planning. The analysis of the results obtained allows to propose a new study integrating both, in which the tangible interactive game is complemented with the emotional trainer in a way that allows identifying and classifying children’s emotion with ASD when they collaborate to solve cognitively significant and contextualized challenges. The first application proposed is an emotional trainer application in which the child can work out the seven basic emotions (happiness, sadness, fear, disgust, anger, surprise and neutral). Further, a serious videogame is proposed: a 3D maze where the emotions can be captured. The second case study was carried out in a Special Education Center, where a set of activities for working cognitive planning was proposed. In this case, a tangible interactive tabletop was used to analyze, in students with ASD, how the communication processes with these interfaces affect to the attention, memory, successive and simultaneous processing that compose cognitive planning from the PASS model. The results of the first study, suggest that the autistic children did not act with previous planning, but they used their perception to adjust their actions a posteriori (that explains the higher number of collisions). On the second case study, the successive processing was not explored. The inclusion of the mazes of case study 1 to a semantic rich scenario could allow us to measure the prior planning and the emotions involved in the maze game. The new physiological sensors will also help to validate the emotions felt by the children. The first study has as objective the capability to imitate emotions and resolve a maze without semantic context. The second study organized all the actions from a semantic context close to users. The attention results presented by the second study are coherent with the first study and complement it showing that attention can be receptive or selective. In the first study case, the receptive attention was the focus of analysis. In the second case, both contributed to explain and understand how it can be developed from a videogame

Educational E-book For Children With and Without Developmental Disorders

In the last decade, Autism Spectrum Disorder (ASD) prevalence rate has signifcantly increased, which consequently led to the expansion of research and expenditure in the feld,predominantly focusing on searching for the cause. In a typical classroom scenario, working with children with ASD very often requires 1:1 teacher to child ratio, which makes it very expensive and difcult to implement. Serious games have been utilised as a medium for teaching various developmental skills, such as social interaction, speech, motor skills development, emotion recognition, and other basic concepts. Designing serious games for ASD population difers from other games and even other serious games signifcantly. It requires a holistic approach with extensive knowledge and expertise from felds other than computer science, such as psychology, sociology and cognitive science. However, once harnessed correctly, such games can be used by children with ASD on their own time, with or without supervision and they can be educational. In addition, they can adjust the appropriate pace while at the same time providing feedback in form of reinforcement and correction. Applying the rules of science of learning and teaching, one can design games that are educational for all types of learners, including children with ASD. In this paper, two independent user studies have been conducted, demonstrating how serious gaming and e-learning principles can be harnessed in order to intervene, develop or strengthen pivotal developmental skills, like learning novel vocabulary, counting, identifying numbers and colours, and responding to inference questions. We have tested the educational e-book with children diagnosed with ASD and with typically developing children to assess skill acquisition in native language for children with ASD and in English, a foreign language, for typically developing children to demonstrate the educational aspect of the game for all types of learners. We showed that the same e-book in two languages can be used for teaching diferent types of learners through a fun and engaging medium