The inclusive principles in Education give schools the enormous responsibility of providing its students, regardless of differences or difficulties they present, learning environments matching the specific needs of each child. Portugal created specialized and structured learning units for children with Autism Spectrum Disorders (ASD), in particular, regarding students with special educational needs, whose severity and diversity of problems require highly differentiated responses.
ASD are serious and early neuro-development dysfunction that have no cure, persist throughout life and can coexist with other pathologies. Typically they are observed as a triad of disturbances with very specific characteristics, namely: (a) reduced social participation; (b) communication deficit; and (c) difficulties in the imaginative and fantasy capabilities with repetitive and stereotyped behaviours. In educational contexts these limitations can be deeply disabling, unless appropriate intervention methodologies are promoted.
Communication competences are one of the most affected areas in individuals with ASD. The incapacity to interpret, use, and respond properly to different communication situations is regularly faced by all autistic individuals (Hewitt, 2005). Regardless of their language abilities, all children with ASD exhibit communication disturbances (Jordan, 2000). These difficulties raise important challenges regarding their ability to interact in social environments.
There is a lack of knowledge and appropriate tools to intervene upon this problem and it is paramount to better characterize the stakeholders’ needs and further expand the state-of-the-art of assistive technologies for the development of the communicative competence in children with ASDs.
Technological resources can assume an important role for these students extending new learning opportunities and offering different communication, expression and autonomy possibilities.
Considering this framework and highlighting the multimedia technologies emergence scenario, this research was developed in order to achieve the following goals:
- Develop and implement a multimedia platform that fosters the development of communication skills in children with ASD in a structured learning environment;
- Highlight the benefits of using innovative multimedia technologies specifically designed to develop communicative competence in ASD children.
The current state-of-the-art technology includes a number of software applications that have been developed minding the cognitive component, centred in the individual himself (Emiliani, 2009; Helal, 2008). Examples of current approaches include the Zac Browser (People CD, 2012), specially designed for recreational use, and the Grid 2 (Sensory Software, 2012), which is aimed at Human-computer interaction. There is a lack of tools specifically targeted at communicative competence and existing solutions are extremely limited in terms of customization and content adaptability.
Thus, our research consisted on the design and development of a multimedia platform named Troc@s that integrates multimedia components (audio, video, and pictures) already explored by existing solutions, but extends the current state-of-the-art in the field by integrating a component to promote communicative competence in children with ASD.
The platform allows ASD children to interact, exchange opinions, experiences, likes and dislikes, and it was designed with an appealing and friendly interface, easy to install, portable and adaptable to cognitive, linguistic, social and educational students level. A special emphasis was given to the ease of customization.
