If you’ve been following my twitter feed, you probably know that I just spent the past four days surrounded by inspiration at the Interaction Design & Children (IDC) 2013 conference. I’m still wrapping my brain around everything I saw and heard (and everyone I interacted with) but I wanted to share some of it here.
While the focus of the conference is about designing interactive products for all children, so many presentations were about the intersection of special needs education and technology. It felt great to connect with like-minded researchers and designers. Not only did I get to meet new people with similar interests, but I was reunited with quite a few that I have worked with before in the children’s television and tech world. Some of my connections even involved people I’ve even written about in this blog, such as J.P. Hourcade, Meryl Alper, and Joy Wong Daniels (of Go Go Games).
There were so many good presentations and demonstrations, but I’d like to offer the following research round-up about autism and technology:
- Marie Boden (and colleagues) from the University of Queensland in Australia presented research she had conducted on using the Kinect in elementary school classrooms of children with autism. They found that the Kinect was beneficial, especially for children who had difficulty paying attention. Future research will focus on the possibility of using Kinect to enhance social interaction for children with autism.
- Alyssa Alcorn (and colleagues) from the University of Edinburgh in Scotland presented some findings that came serendipitously as she was researching children with autism and video games. She was working with 5- to 7-year-olds on a study that involved a video game about matching. Apparently, when the game did not work correctly (in this case, the computer accidentally allowed for mismatches on occasion), subjects would have spontaneous moments of language. She found that these glitches in the game, which were discrepancies of the rules, did not cause the children to become upset (as one might expect with children with autism), but instead they simply interacted with the researchers more.
- Sanika Mokashi (and colleagues) from Georgia Institute of Technology presented a poster on some exploratory research using videochat with children with autism. They had children and teachers explore two different configurations of videochat: the standard screen (with the user’s self-image much smaller and in the corner) versus a side-by-side layout (with both user and conversation partner displayed in equal-sized boxes on the screen). Both layouts worked well, and the authors concluded that videochat could be beneficial to children with autism.
- There were also several demos of new products being developed for individuals with Autism Spectrum Disorders; namely these were smartphone apps. HygieneHelper is a multimedia app designed to help teens with ASD learn about and track their personal hygiene behaviors. VidCoach uses video modeling (both peer and self-modeling) to help those with ASD practice job interviewing skills.
I was truly inspired by the final panel discussion of this four-day conference, which was a tribute to Seymour Papert. For those of you not familiar with the name, this is the man who created Logo, the programming language for children, and the brain behind Lego Mindstorms. The panel consisted of esteemed researchers who studied under him at the MIT Media Lab in the ’70s and ’80s. (You can watch the recorded livestream video of this panel discussion by following this link.) Among those who spoke, Allison Druin (University of Maryland) presented some beautiful quotes from Papert. The one in this picture especially reminded me of the argument for inclusion education:
“Why should children be segregated by ages? Why do we even have this idea of people of one age spending most of their time together in a classroom? Children learn better and are able to develop emotionally in very mixed-aged families…”
This quote stands for everything I have been thinking about in the past decade in relation to media and technology for young children, namely: co-viewing and joint media engagement, inclusion education where mixed ages (and abilities) can help and learn from each other. While the quote itself has nothing to do with technology, it does impact the way we can design new learning tools for children. After hearing this, I walked away from the conference with a renewed sense of hope and understanding for my purpose in life.