Drawing in Virtual Reality for children with ASD
This story is a part of the Rewire.Education cycle. In order to understand what it’s all about better, you can read the introduction here.
Drawing in Virtual Reality
All teacher’s guides, exercises and games teachers requested us to develop are accessible to everyone at Rewire.Education.
What is it: A fascinating painting simulator where you draw the movement trajectory of a car in a distraction-free virtual space. Per se, these are graphomotor-based activity exercises.
How does it work: A teacher is monitoring the process using a tablet or a smartphone. In a distraction-free virtual space, race tracks of different shapes (straight, zigzag, wavy) are displayed, and the player must draw a path for the car using a controller. If the player succeeds in the tasks the teacher planned for them, a free drawing mode in virtual space becomes activated as a reward. The player can then draw what they want or ask the viewers to guess what they are willing to draw in the process.
What we wanted to achieve: To compare the level of motivation of children in graphomotor-based activity exercises using a pen & paper versus virtual reality.
How did it go: Project initiator — Natalya Malinova, ABA department coordinator.
Our children are very well-versed in all gadgets, computer games, tablets, and so on. At the same time, in virtual reality, they can show themselves from a completely different side than in their natural surroundings. Therefore, I was very interested in how successfully a child could perform in virtual reality as against what they could not achieve in their natural surroundings.
We chose graphomotor-based activities because of the fact that when a child takes a pencil or a pen in their hand, they become afraid of failure and, as a result, they do not want to do anything and instead ask for hints all the time. I have a few such children. For example, Egor — he can easily beat the exercises in his natural surroundings, but the way he does that is completely without thought… ‘I was told to do it, so I did it’. I was interested to see how fast he would adapt if I transferred the task to another reality.
It was cool. On the first day, when we were just putting the helmet on, he was already straining himself, and the exercise was completed only with a full physical hint. On the second day, he used only the Oculus Go controller: we put his fingers on the buttons he needed to press and he… completed the first graphomotor-based exercises. For the first time, he passed… well, he passed by making swirls and going beyond the borderlines… but the car moved, and he liked it.
After that, he understood the method and yesterday he completed four levels all by himself. When the zigzag road appeared before him for the first time, he drew a straight line, but the second try was done correctly — he drew a zigzag. I find this absolutely stunning and I believe he found it cool too, he even recalled it later. In the evening, I spoke to him, and he said: ‘Yellow car, the yellow car moves!’
My idea was to help the child independently master these motor skills, which were hard for him to master on paper. But if he realizes that he can do that in virtual reality — that it is cool — it will become a lot easier for him to do the same in, for example, a school environment.
The next step will be to complicate things up: from simple tracks, we will move on to more complex figures, maybe even voluminous ones, so that the child can understand that they are successful at this, that they are doing everything well and that it is even fun — that’s the point. And then we can move on to letters, typing, and numbers! That is, to raise the level of preschool and academic skills — I think it will be great!
Conclusion
We do not want to draw conclusions prematurely by saying that after drawing in virtual reality the results on paper also improved. Only a few students tried drawing in VR. We will definitely share the results with you when more students take part in the experiment.
We can say with confidence that the children wanted to return to the game. Both adults and children enjoyed the group game in which one of the children was drawing in a virtual reality headset and the rest were guessing what they were drawing by looking at the screen.
All teacher’s guides, exercises and games teachers requested us to develop are accessible to everyone at Rewire.Education.
