COMP 190/190 -039
Class #6 - January 28, 2003
Developmental Disorders
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Dorothy Strickland is the president of Virtual Reality Aids, Inc., the company that supports the Do2Learn website. Having obtained her M.S. in computer science at UNC-CH and her Ph.D. in computer engineering from NC State, she now heads up this government-funded research group that focuses on using Virtual Reality (VR) games to help children with autism and other pervasive developmental disorders (PDD) learn the skills needed to interact with their surroundings.
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The team's research was rooted in academia, but through the help of governmental small business development grants, Do2Learn has received Phase 1 and Phase 2 of funding to extend their academic research and produce commercially viable products.
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Discussion of autism:
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Definition: Autism, the most prevalent of the PDDs, is a mental condition marked by withdrawal from the outside world. It is a spectrum disorder for which there are many derivative forms, making it hard to diagnose.
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Two brief videos were presented to the class to demonstrate the width of the spectrum of autism-related disorders. One clip highlighted the behavioral characteristics and learning patterns of an Indian child who suffers an extreme form of autism. His mother has spent hours and hours trying different -- and often agonizingly repetitive -- methods for trying to help him learn both word/object associations and alternate communication techniques. In contrast, the other video showed an American child who has mild Asperger's Syndrome. While he has difficulty communicating and learning, he otherwise behaves and plays like a non-autistic child.
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Until recent years, people generally considered autistic individuals as mentally retarded.
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Current research has proven, however, that autism is a neurological disorder that impedes communication and causes one to perceive the world differently. This often makes the individual feel trapped in his own thoughts that he cannot communicate clearly, as evidenced by the Indian child's behavioral traits.
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By developing facilitative learning methods, researchers have been able to discover that many autistic children possess highly advanced thought processes at young ages -- but they lack the capacity for communicating in traditional ways, so people have viewed them as mentally handicapped.
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According to the Autism Society of America, autism typically appears during the first three years of life, occurs in 2-6 out of every 10,000 individuals, and is four times more prevalent in boys than in girls.
Software for Children with Special Needs
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Dorothy's research has shown that games are one of the most effective ways of facilitating learning in children with autism because they allow the user to attempt to accomplish simple tasks in a non-social environment while receiving positive feedback.
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Product design concerns: Commercial applications have existed for a while but are overwhelmingly expensive. Do2Learn products are either free or very inexpensive. About half of home users have outdated computer hardware and slow modem connections to the Web; therefore, Do2Learn continously faces the problem of deciding how to implement each new game so that it can reach the most people. In the future it plans on responding to the decline in ISP quality of service by releasing CDs of its games.
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Street Safety Game: The Do2Learn project got started eight years ago to determine whether VR could help children with autism learn the beginning skills of crossing the street. This game resulted.
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Fire Safety Game: Dorothy demonstrated this game to the class. As with all these games, the fire safety simulation offers a lot of customization menus that allow parents to control the features, difficulty level, and so forth. This particular simulation challenges the user to navigate (with guidance from a helper) out of a house to a meeting place when confronted with fires in different rooms.
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Facial Expressions: Dorothy demonstrated this applet that allows the child to experiment with facial characteristics in order to learn how to make associations between feelings and facial expressions.
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Schedule Cards: Do2Learn also develops simple black-and-white picture cards that help parents build schedules for daily activities.
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Language Development Games: For $3.00 each, parents can purchase games for language development and skill building, such as the Learn the Object game Dorothy demonstrated in class. These games were originally developed using HTML/JavaScript and sequential JPEGs as "video clips."
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Fire Safety Song: Given the different ways in which children learn, the research team has developed a Flash movie with animation, music, and lyrics that help children with developmental disorders learn what to do in the case of a fire.