Abstract
Autism spectrum disorders (ASDs) are highly prevalent and the number of children diagnosed with it is increasing alarmingly every year. The child's learning is majorly hindered due to poor social interaction, communication, fine motor skills, and attention span. Building these skills in them is a demanding job and interactive toys can come to teacher's and parent's rescue. Although interactive toys can play a vital role and provide a therapeutic effect on children, it is found that there is a lack of such toys in the commercial market. An attempt is made to build such a toy that is specially designed for the learning needs of autistic children aged 4-7 years. It helps in building fine motor skills, developing speech and language, and improving their attention span. This product named Giffo is based on a cause-effect principle and designed by using primary and secondary research data and observation session insights. It gives the multisensory experience that engages their tactile, visual and auditory senses. Moreover, different sensory rewards have been introduced in the form of light and sound which helps in captivating their interest and improves their attention span. It was observed significantly through usability testing that cause-effect play motivates autistic children to play for a longer time and managed to capture and increase their attention span from 1-3 minutes to around 5-8 minutes. Moreover, this product gives them a sense of control by providing a structured situation all the time which makes their learning process efficient.
Author Information
Jyotsana, Publicis Sapient, India
Abhishek Bose, Go-Jek, India
Paper Information
Conference: ACE2019
Stream: Learning Experiences
This paper is part of the ACE2019 Conference Proceedings (View)
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