Designing an Educational Tabletop Software for Children with Autism

Discrete Trial Training (DTT) is an intervention method used by behaviour analysts for teaching skills to children with Autism Spectrum Disorder (ASD) around a table using physical materials and artefacts. Traditional DTT suffers from these main challenges: inconsistency due to human limitations; need for focusing the child’s attention on the trial at hand; and disruptions on account of insession data recording and analysis by the analysts while delivering the training. Developed in collaboration with HCI and behaviour analysis experts, our proposed solution is an interactive, tabletop software application that provides the consistency and integrity that DTT aims to achieve, while engaging the child’s attention on the interactive interface, and seamlessly collecting and analysing in-session data in the background. Upcoming usability evaluations of the prototype promise to provide insight into the potential effectiveness of our prototype.