Designing motion-based activities to engage students with autism in classroom settings

Abstract

We report on a nine-month-long observational study with teachers and students with autism in a classroom setting. We explore the impact of motion-based activities on students' behavior. In particular, we examine how the playful gaming activity impacted students' engagement, peer-directed social behaviors, and motor skills. We document the effectiveness of a collaborative game in supporting initiation of social activities between peers, and in eliciting novel body movements that students were not observed to produce outside of game play. We further identify the positive impact of game play on overall classroom engagement. This includes an "audience effect" whereby non-playing peers direct initiations to those playing the game and vice versa, and a positive "spillover" effect of the activity on students' social behavior outside of game play. We identify key considerations for designing and deploying motion-based activities for children with autism in a classroom setting. Copyright is held by the owner/author(s)

Designing Movement-based Play With Young People Using Powered Wheelchairs

“…For example, Morelli and Folmer [22] designed a range of audio-guided exergames for players who are blind, Rector et al [28] created eyes-free yoga, an exergames for people with visual impairments, and Bhattacharya et al [2] explored interactive play to engage children with autism. Addressing the design of games for players with physical disabilities, a number of projects have explored the potential of movement-based games, often focusing on their potential to support therapy and rehabilitation and to encourage players to be more physically active (e.g., playful therapeutic environments for children with physical disabilities [27]).…”

Mazi

“…SoundBeam [2] and Polipo [5]; or they target accessible instruments for musical expression and promotion of general well-being [3,25]. However, more recent studies on social skills development for children with autism focused on VR, AR, robots and computer vision in general [36,37,14,41]. This may be due to the increased availability of such tools and the fact that mild autistic individuals are more able to develop compensation strategies and transfer this type of interaction to real life situations.…”

“…As explained by Hornecker et al [11] central to the notion of shareability is the concept of entry and access points, where the former "invite and entice people into engagement" and the latter enables "users to join a group's activity, allowing perceptual and manipulative access and fluidity of sharing" [Ibid]. However, despite the potential benefit of TUIs for supporting play and communication [17] recent studies on functional social skills development target children with low support needs and Asperger and are particularly focused on VR, AR, robots and computer vision [37,36,41]. As children with autism, especially those in the lower end of the spectrum, have difficulty with abstraction of thoughts, we explore in this paper how physical interaction might enhance the possibility of sharing positive experiences between children.…”

Involving Autistics in User Experience Studies

“…And both substudies together form a study. In most substudies (n=79), autistics are mentioned as 'user with ASD' [50], yet there are substudies where the degree of autism was specified as well: 43 substudies with highfunctioning autistics (HFA) [44,15], 20 with medium/low functioning (M/LFA) autistics [19,11] and 5 with severe autistics [33]. Among autistic users, from all developmental stages, children (47%) and adolescents (30.3%) are the age ranges most often involved in UX studies (Fig.…”