A poster with the initial results of our study was presented at ITASD 2014, the 2nd international conference on Innovative Technologies for Autism. The conference focuses on how digital technologies can be used to improve the daily lives of people with autism. Its aim is to join experts in the field people with autism, the scientific community, educators, professionals, developers and families. This was a great opportunity to get in contact with families and end-users!

During May we carried out a preliminar evaluation of the game “Pico’s Adventure”. The study involved  10 boys within the Autistic Spectrum Disorder (mean age: 5,3; SD:0,94 ) and was carried on at the Hospital Sant Joan de Deu. The goals of the study were: to evaluate the likeness of the game, to analyze whether it triggers behaviors related with social initiation (such as asking for help, requesting something or sharing commentaries) and eventually to improve its design.

Preliminary results proceeding from field observation showed a general good acceptance of the game by the children. Several behaviors associated with social interaction were observed, such as: social smiling, visual contact, vocalization directed toward adults and game’s character, use of descriptive gestures, imitation, use of social expressions, pointing, sharing of emotions, initiation of social interaction (i.e. call the attention of the parents when something interesting happens), response to social interaction and collaboration through regulatory and illustrative social interactions (i.e. they explained or indicated how to do something to another child).

Taking into account these results we consider that the preliminary study showed encouraging outcomes in terms of children’s acceptance of the game and in relation to promotion of social initiation. We are currently carrying a follow-up study aimed toward validating the effectiveness of the game and comparing baseline

A detailed analysis of the techniques and strategies used to faciliate children involvement in the codesign process  will be presented at the 13th international conference on Interaction Design & Children (IDC), which mission is to bring together researchers, designers and educators to explore new forms of technology, design and engaged learning among children. In this conference we will be presenting the long paper Participatory Design Strategies to Enhance the Creative Contribution of Children with Special Needs

Initial outcomes related with the design method aimed at merging experts and children contributions for designing the game “Pico’s Adventure” will be presented at the ACM CHI Conference on Human Factors in Computing Systems, the premier international conference of Human-Computer Interaction. In this conference we will be presenting a poster of the paper Narrative-Based Elicitation: Orchestrating Contributions from Experts and Children, in which details about our design method for merging experts and children contributions are described.

To start designing the game “Pico’s Adventure” we involved experts and children in the design process.Firstly we collaborared with the experts of the “Hospital Sant Joan de Deu”  to define the therapeutic goals and requirements; secondly, we carried out a participatory design with children to transform defined goals into an enjoyable playful experience.
The main goals of including “children as co-designers” in the game were to gather new ideas from children and evaluate which aspects elicit higher level of motivation and interest in children.

The workshop took place in the “Hospital Sant Joan de Deu“ on a weekly basis. The participants selected by the UETD professionals were four children how joined a total of five sessions, during which they were designing, discussing, drawing and experimenting with us in order to create an interesting and enjoyable game. The experience has been incredibly enriching both from the point of view of the research and the game design. We are very thankful to the “co-designer” children for their contributions!

In case you want to know more information about the design process you can read:

• Mora-Guiard, J., Malinverni, L., Pares, N., (2014) Narrative-Based Elicitation: Orchestrating Contributions from Experts and Children, in CHI ’14 Extended Abstracts Proceedings of ACM SIGCHI Conference on Human Factors in Computing Systems, Toronto, Canada

• Malinverni, L., Mora-Guiard, J., Padillo, V., Mairena, M.A., Hervás, A., Pares, N., (2014) Participatory Design Strategies to Enhance the Creative Contribution of Children with Special Needs, in Proceedings of the 2014 Conference on Interaction Design and Children, IDC2014, Aarhus, Denmark