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Education |
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Atmosphere Design for Do2Learn Social Skills Game |
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Dorothy Strickland and her team use Atmosphere to help autistic children learn real world social skills
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| Dorothy tells us about the project... |
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| The National Institutes of Health has funded us with a grant to determine if we can develop computer tools to help children learn the basic rules of social interactions. We have chosen to see if we can teach children with autism, who have difficulties in social situations, two pizza restaurant skills that they did not previously know. The study includes multiple parts: Determine skills not known by the four to six autistic children ages seven to sixteen in our controlled study. Example of the skill steps are"asking to be seated" or "starting a conversation at the table". Explain the new rules by using printed lists and videos of real people doing the skills in a restaurant Let the child practice the rules with avatars in a 3D game with either the Wild Tangent or Quake II platform. The game will include items like a video display of each action as it is done, questions where they have to click the right choice, and a "help" window if they need assistance Supplement the game practice with Atmosphere to learn some very basic social concepts, such as not standing too close or too far from people when speaking to them, and let several children practice in a virtual pizza restaurant together with a therapist monitor. Because children with autism have difficulty generalizing, the Atmosphere section allows them to practice variations with other people in a controlled setting.Supplement the 3D world with our facial expressions game and videos to understand non-verbal facial cues Measure if knowledge generalizes to a real pizza restaurant No one has as yet been successful in teaching social skills in a way that children can generalize what they learn in a classroom or the computer to the real world. I am hoping Atmosphere will help make this transition because it has elements of both, the engaging computer element that allows children to be a character of their own imagination in a less threatening, more forgiving, and more controllable environment than the real world, while still allowing the unpredictability of responses from other real people, not just game avatars. We have already been approved for the larger multi-year grant, contingent on the success of this Phase I part, so our incentive to make it work is large. |
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