A PILOT STUDY OF THE SITUATED GAME FOR AUTISTIC CHILDREN LEARNING ACTIVITIES OF DAILY LIVING

Abstract

Daily living skills are difficult for autistic children to learn because they have low motivation in learning new things. Some research had developed virtual environments to assist parents and teachers in teaching autistic children daily living skills. Educators still need to spend a lot of time in preparing personalized and more realistic tasks for children to practice in the virtual environments. The research team developed a situated game which is capable of generating personalized and non- repeated daily living activities for individual children. A small pilot had designed and conducted for verifying the effectiveness of the game and gathering the users’ (including parents and the autistic children) perceptions toward the game and the game-play. Questionnaire and interviews were used to collect user perceptions. While quantitative analysis method (with SPSS) was used to give readers an overview idea of what users felt, thematic analysis (with NVivo) was taken for analyzing interview transcripts and results could be the basis of our game’s future improvements. The results show that both of autistic children and their parents all gave positive feedback to the game. Suggestions for the game development for autistic children are also given based on the analysis results of questionnaire and parents’ interview.