Rewire.Education — 3 stories told by teachers, who came up with ideas of video games for children with ASD.
If you want to read the original publication by ‘Our Sunny World’ rehabilitation center for children with ASD in Russian, please click here.
According to the World Health Organization (WHO), the number of children with ASD in the world is growing rapidly. According to WHO, every 160th child in the world now has special developmental needs. A person with ASD can remain speechless, locked into one’s own world, not gaining the ability to communicate with other people if no one takes special care of their education. At the current moment, science has not yet found the reason behind this change in development. However, for many years, organizations around the world have been successfully working on promoting effective socialization of people with ASD of different ages and levels of special developmental needs. ‘Our Sunny World’ center is one of the first and most effective and respected organizations in this field in Russia. It was found in 1991 by parents of children with ASD along with specialists in this field.
We are fully convinced that a person with ASD is able to fully develop in conditions specially adapted for them, taking their personal characteristics in the perception of the outside world and the motivation specifics into account. The use of virtual reality and gadgets, in general, allows us to create conditions for making activities of the highest possible interest for the child. Children with ASD, as a rule, have serious difficulties in motivation for voluntary activity. They are more familiar with activities aimed directly at getting immediate feelings. In addition, due to the specifically developed system of affective regulation, many people with ASD are experiencing serious difficulties with any voluntary actions as if they are ‘afraid’ of doing something. Saying a word, looking in the right direction, pressing a key on the keyboard. Due to this, many of them are unable to effectively interact with other people and also with inanimate objects of the outside world.
Many of the examples described in this article show us how we can help such people using special apps and virtual reality.
And they really, really need such help.
‘Our Sunny World’ team expresses sincere gratitude to the authors of this article, for their initiative and professional assistance to our mentees, children and adults with ASD.
Igor Shpitsberg, Director of the rehabilitation center for children with ASD ‘Our Sunny World’.
Long story short
We at Luden.io receive a lot of letters from the players of our educational projects, such as InMind, InMind 2, InCell and while True: learn(). By the end of 2018, we began to receive more and more requests to make a game that could help people with ASD learning. We decided to talk to teachers, parents, and people with ASD to see if our experience in developing educational video games could be of use.
That’s how the Rewire.Education project was born. Rewire.Education is a compilation of video games for Web, Chromebooks, Android, iOS, PC, and Oculus Go (virtual reality headset), created in cooperation with teachers who practice completely different methods — ABA, DIR Floortime, and many others.
Together with the teachers, we came to the conclusion that the benefits of video games for people with ASD lie in the fact that in the game, we can be whatever we want, any hero with any character, any type of mind and collaborate to achieve a common goal in a fun and safe sandbox. Thanks to this “repetition”, people with ASD enjoy communication and teamwork after playing a game in the real world. All of this helps us to address the biggest goal — to teach people to “read between the lines” in social interactions.
From the very first days, our games were adopted in classes, the results of this implementation continue to surprise us with each new lesson. Since then, we are convinced that by working together with neuro-diverse people, we can create incredible things and make the world a better place.
Despite the fact that specialists from the US and Australia show the greatest interest in the project, we want to tell you a few stories of teachers from Russia, ‘Our Sunny World’ center.
‘Our Sunny World’ is one of Russia’s largest rehabilitation centers for people with ASD and other special developmental needs. Dozens of teachers work there, and hundreds of students are engaged in it. Together with the specialists of the center, we added three games to Rewire, which the teachers then tested directly in the classroom. After dozens of edits and refinements, under the guidance of teachers who co-authored the concepts of the games, the games were tested in ‘Our Sunny World’ summer camp, where it was possible to conduct a number of pedagogical experiments in intensive conditions. The levels of functional development and the ages of the subjects were different: the youngest person was 6 years old, the oldest was 28.
All the experiment participants’ names were changed and all the names of the applications mentioned are working titles and may change in the future.
1/3 Read the story about Teamwork Adventure Game
2/3 Read the story about Virtual Reality Keyboard
3/3 Read the story about Drawing in Virtual Reality
All teacher’s guides, exercises and games teachers requested us to develop are accessible to everyone at Rewire.Education.
