Alexandru, Cristina

Constantin, Aurora

Dragomir, Mihaela

English

Previous work suggests involving autistic children in participatory design (PD) benefits them. However, express thoughts are two of the most acknowledged difficulties autistic children face during the PD process, particularly during the stage of idea generation. These are linked to the disorder-specific impairments in social interaction and rigidity in thought and behaviour. Recent work recommended technology as a tool to support children during idea generation. Building up on these efforts, this paper proposes using crowdsourcing with a team of selected online workers, as a way to generate child-specific hints to help autistic children unlock their creativity. Moreover, machine learning techniques and the majority decision approach are suggested to remove noise, redundancy, and select the child-specific hints

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     Edinburgh Research Explorer                                      Using Crowdsourcing to Foster Creativity in Children withAutism during Idea GenerationCitation for published version:Constantin, A, Alexandru, C & Dragomir, M 2019, 'Using Crowdsourcing to Foster Creativity in Children withAutism during Idea Generation', Paper presented at Designing Crowd-powered Creativity Support Systems,Glasgow, United Kingdom, 4/05/19 - 4/05/19.Link:Link to publication record in Edinburgh Research ExplorerDocument Version:Peer reviewed versionGeneral rightsCopyright for the publications made accessible via the Edinburgh Research Explorer is retained by the author(s)and / or other copyright owners and it is a condition of accessing these publications that users recognise andabide by the legal requirements associated with these rights.Take down policyThe University of Edinburgh has made every reasonable effort to ensure that Edinburgh Research Explorercontent complies with UK legislation. If you believe that the public display of this file breaches copyright pleasecontact openaccess@ed.ac.uk providing details, and we will remove access to the work immediately andinvestigate your claim.Download date: 11. May. 2020Using Crowdsourcing to FosterCreativity in Children with Autismduring Idea GenerationAurora ConstantinUniversity of EdinburghEdinburgh, UKaurora.constantin@ed.ac.ukCristina Adriana AlexandruMihaela DragomirUniversity of EdinburghEdinburgh, UKcristina.alexandru@ed.ac.ukm.dragomir@sms.ed.ac.ukABSTRACTPrevious work suggests involving autistic children in participatory design (PD) benefits them. However,such inclusion does not come without challenges. Decision-making and the ability to creativelyAutism Spectrum Disorder (ASD)Autism Spectrum Disorder is a neurodevelop-mental condition that affects social interaction,communication, interests and behaviour [1]. Inlight of the recent discussions around terminol-ogy, identify-first language will be adopted inthis article [8].express thoughts are two of the most acknowledged difficulties autistic children face during the PDprocess, particularly during the stage of idea generation. These are linked to the disorder-specificimpairments in social interaction and rigidity in thought and behaviour. Recent work recommendedtechnology as a tool to support children during idea generation. Building up on these efforts, thispaper proposes using crowdsourcing with a team of selected online workers, as a way to generatechild-specific hints to help autistic children unlock their creativity. Moreover, machine learningtechniques and the majority decision approach are suggested to remove noise, redundancy, and selectthe child-specific hints.Permission to make digital or hard copies of all or part of this work for personal or classroom use is granted without feeprovided that copies are not made or distributed for profit or commercial advantage and that copies bear this notice and thefull citation on the first page. Copyrights for components of this work owned by others than the author(s) must be honored.Abstracting with credit is permitted. To copy otherwise, or republish, to post on servers or to redistribute to lists, requires priorspecific permission and/or a fee. Request permissions from permissions@acm.org.CHI’19 Extended Abstracts, May 4–9, 2019, Glasgow, Scotland Uk© 2019 Copyright held by the owner/author(s). Publication rights licensed to ACM.ACM ISBN 978-x-xxxx-xxxx-x/YY/MM. . . $15.00https://doi.org/10.1145/nnnnnnn.nnnnnnnUsing Crowdsourcing to Foster Creativity in Children with Autism during Idea Generation CHI’19 Extended Abstracts, May 4–9, 2019, Glasgow, Scotland UkKEYWORDScrowdsourcing; machine learning; Participatory Design; PD; co-design; children; autism; hintsACM Reference Format:Aurora Constantin and Cristina Adriana Alexandru, Mihaela Dragomir. 2019. Using Crowdsourcing to FosterCreativity in Children with Autism during Idea Generation. In CHI Conference on Human Factors in ComputingSystems Extended Abstracts (CHI’19 Extended Abstracts), May 4–9, 2019, Glasgow, Scotland Uk. ACM, New York,NY, USA, 5 pages. https://doi.org/10.1145/nnnnnnn.nnnnnnnINTRODUCTIONParticipatory Design (PD) DefinitionThe central design philosophy of PD is to givecareful attention to the end-users’ needs, wantsand abilities, by involving them throughout theentire design process as design partners [11].Researchers have been increasingly recognising that involving children with Autism SpectrumDisorders (ASD) in the design process of technology through Participatory Design (PD) leads toan increase of appropriateness of the outcomes [2]. It also empowers these children, helping themdevelop new skills (e.g. social-communication skills and self-esteem). Idea generation, which is oneof the early stages during PD, is particularly challenging as it is intertwined with creativity anddecision making. Because of their difficulties with social interaction and their rigidity in thoughts andbehavior, autistic children have difficulties both in expressing their creativity and making decisions[10]. Moreover, during PD, children have to work in a team with designers, making the process evenmore challenging taking into account their difficulties in social interaction. Building on the existingresearch in the PD, one of the authors designed a prototype of a technology-based customisable toolto better support children with ASD during the idea generation stage of PD focused on educationalgames [4]. The reason was that a technology-based tool can act as an interface between designers andchildren with ASD, creating a social distance and a more predictable and controllable environment(compared to traditional approaches to PD). In addition, technology is well placed to provide supportfor creativity and decision making [12]. For example, children can receive hints when they are stuckand can be encouraged to build on them. In the initial design, the hints were introduced in the systemby designers [4] who do not necessarily have experience in autism. We propose now a solution toimprove this prototype by using crowdsourcing and machine learning to provide children appropriatehints fostered by people with experience in working with autistic children. This work builds on theresearch of Lasecki et al. [9].THE TECHNOLOGY-BASED TOOLA prototype has been iteratively developed based on a series of studies (e.g. focus group, interviews,prototyping and task-based evaluation) [4]. These studies involved 6 practitioners experienced inworking with children with ASD, 9 researchers in the field of HCI, Psychology and Education, and 5typically developing children (TD). The initial studies led to a set of high level requirements, whichUsing Crowdsourcing to Foster Creativity in Children with Autism during Idea Generation CHI’19 Extended Abstracts, May 4–9, 2019, Glasgow, Scotland Ukincluded: guide children with a virtual customisable character through the design (e.g. introducethe design problem and tasks, provide hints to inspire children), provide sticky notes for children tointroduce their ideas in various modalities (e.g. typing, drawing, adding an image from the gallery orvoice recording), use rewards to motivate and engage children.When the child is logged in, the character welcomes the child and prompts them to introduce theirnames [4]. After choosing their preferred project, the prototype introduces the child to the designproblem through a fictional story [6]. The child receives a number of design tasks which are displayedon the screen [4]. They are encouraged to work through the tasks and create as many ideas as theycan. The character guides the child to introduce their ideas (e.g. by typing, drawing, adding an imagefrom the gallery or recording their voice). When the child runs out of ideas or is stuck, the characterprompts the child to ask for help by pressing a button, which displays hints for the child. Besidesits guiding role, the character has the role of rewarding the child for each achievement. The rewardis incremental, reflecting the child’s progress, as recommended by [5] based on their research withautistic children.USING CROWDSOURCING AND MACHINE LEARNING TO PROVIDE SUPPORTWHICHIS BETTER ADAPTED TO EACH CHILDRegistering UsersWe propose registering both the child, as well as the online workers, on the tool. Children will havetheir profile set up by their parents in terms of the characteristics of their autism. On doing this,parents will be asked for written agreement that this data about their child (only, no identificationdata) is shared via crowdsourcing. Online workers who are either specialised in autism, or who workwith autistic children, will be invited. They will register themselves on the tool and their level ofexperience with different characteristics of autism will be evaluated as part of this registration, suchthat only users with certain levels of experience will be accepted as online workers.Designing a Task for the Online WorkersWhen a child gets stuck during idea generation and needs a hint, a task will automatically be designedfor the online workers. Its instructions will contain:• The design problem• The design task instructions that the child has been given• The child’s profile from his/her registration• The ideas that the child has come up with so far• Guidelines for avoiding generating hints which would lead the child to idea fixation or ideaswhich lack relevance/coherence ([3])Using Crowdsourcing to Foster Creativity in Children with Autism during Idea Generation CHI’19 Extended Abstracts, May 4–9, 2019, Glasgow, Scotland Uk• A request for a one-phrase hint for the childForming the Group of Online WorkersOnce the task has been set up, a group of online workers will be established to help the child. Theywill automatically be chosen based on the match between their profile and that of the child (i.e. howexperienced they are with the child’s autism characteristics), and their availability.Assigning the Task to the Online WorkersOnce the group has been created, the online workers will each individually be assigned the task. Then,workers will each individually propose a one-phrase hint for the child.Evaluating and Selecting HintsThe generated hints will first only be shared between the online workers. Each worker will randomlyreceive a subset of the hints provided by others, andwill be asked to rate them based on appropriatenessfor the child and level of support provided, by using a series of questions. The initial crowdsourcingtask instructions will also be provided, to aid in this evaluation. The workers will only evaluate hintsonce they have submitted their own, to avoid the risk of fixation and generating ideas which lackrelevance/coherence themselves.The hints with ranking below a certain threshold will be dismissed. Machine learning will thenbe used with the remaining appropriate and useful hints, to remove noise and redundancy. Finally,the majority decision approach ([7]) will select the hint which was mostly returned, which will beprovided to the child.CONCLUSION, DISCUSSION, FUTUREWORKThis position paper has introduced the idea of using crowdsourcing in a technology-based toolsupporting autistic children during the idea generation phase of PD, to provide hints which are betteradapted to each child, and can thus unlock their creativity. We are very excited about the prospect oftaking benefit of a ’collective intelligence’ and joint experience with autism to best support autisticchildren in their creative process during PD.Future work involves implementing the presented approach, and experimenting with using it in PDscenarios. We plan to evaluate with autistic children and practitioners from schools across Edinburgh,UK. Moreover, we plan to extend this approach to also using crowdsourcing to generate child-adaptednarratives of the design problem and rewards for children for creative ideas.Through participation to the workshop, we are looking forward to establishing collaborations withexperts in crowdsourcing to further refine our approach.Using Crowdsourcing to Foster Creativity in Children with Autism during Idea Generation CHI’19 Extended Abstracts, May 4–9, 2019, Glasgow, Scotland UkREFERENCES[1] American Psychiatric Association et al. 2013. Diagnostic and statistical manual of mental disorders (DSM-5®). AmericanPsychiatric Pub.[2] Laura Benton, Hilary Johnson, Emma Ashwin, Mark Brosnan, and Beate Grawemeyer. 2012. Developing IDEAS: supportingchildren with autism within a participatory design team. In Proceedings of the SIGCHI conference on Human factors incomputing systems. ACM, 2599–2608.[3] Laura Benton, George Varotsis, and Asimina Vasalou. 2019. Leading by example: Exploring the influence of designexamples on children’s creative ideation. International Journal of Human-Computer Studies 122 (2019), 174–183.[4] Aurora Constantin and Juan Pablo Hourcade. 2018. Toward a Technology-based Tool to Support Idea Generation duringParticipatory Design with Children with Autism Spectrum Disorders. In Proceedings of the 20th International ACMSIGACCESS Conference on Computers and Accessibility. ACM, 385–387.[5] Aurora Constantin, Hilary Johnson, Elizabeth Smith, Denise Lengyel, and Mark Brosnan. 2017. Designing computer-basedrewards with and for children with Autism Spectrum Disorder and/or Intellectual Disability. Computers in Human Behavior75 (2017), 404–414.[6] Jerry Alan Fails, Mona Leigh Guha, Allison Druin, et al. 2013. Methods and techniques for involving children in the designof new technology for children. Foundations and Trends® in Human–Computer Interaction 6, 2 (2013), 85–166.[7] Matthias Hirth, Tobias Hoßfeld, and Phuoc Tran-Gia. 2013. Analyzing costs and accuracy of validation mechanisms forcrowdsourcing platforms. Mathematical and Computer Modelling 57, 11-12 (2013), 2918–2932.[8] Lorcan Kenny, Caroline Hattersley, Bonnie Molins, Carole Buckley, Carol Povey, and Elizabeth Pellicano. 2016. Whichterms should be used to describe autism? Perspectives from the UK autism community. Autism 20, 4 (2016), 442–462.[9] Walter S Lasecki, Rachel Wesley, Jeffrey Nichols, Anand Kulkarni, James F Allen, and Jeffrey P Bigham. 2013. Chorus: acrowd-powered conversational assistant. In Proceedings of the 26th annual ACM symposium on User interface software andtechnology. ACM, 151–162.[10] Julia Makhaeva, Christopher Frauenberger, and Katharina Spiel. 2016. Creating creative spaces for co-designing withautistic children: the concept of a Handlungsspielraum. In Proceedings of the 14th Participatory Design Conference: Fullpapers-Volume 1. ACM, 51–60.[11] Douglas Schuler and Aki Namioka. 1993. Participatory design: Principles and practices. CRC Press.[12] Ben Shneiderman. 2002. Creativity support tools. Commun. ACM 45, 10 (2002), 116–120.

Using Crowdsourcing to Foster Creativity in Children with Autism during Idea Generation

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Using Crowdsourcing to Foster Creativity in Children with Autism during Idea Generation

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