Social Play Technologies for Autistic Children

Social play is key for successful inclusion of children with disabilities and has significant impact on their wellbeing and development. Typical traits in autism, such as impaired social and communication skills and repetitive behaviours, make social play particularly challenging for children diagnosed on the spectrum, exposing them to a wide range of mental health risks. This project investigates how technology can help support social play activities in mixed, co-located groups of autistic and neuro-typical children, aged 6 to 8 years. We aim to develop smart play objects, which can intelligently react to social situations to scaffold interactive play experiences of autistic children and their typically developing peers. For such objects to be meaningful to different children, it is key to involve them actively in their design. This poses three fundamental research questions: a) how can we design such objects in collaboration with mixed groups of children? b) what kinds of technology support shared play experiences and c) how can we evaluate what impact these objects have on social play? In design, we build on our experiences from the OutsideTheBox - Rethinking Assistive Technologies with Children with Autism project, where we have successfully implemented different methods for engagement, for example through craft materials, storytelling, digital fabrication or theatre workshops. In OutsideTheBox we worked individually with autistic children, the challenge in this project is to design in mixed groups for social play, something that has not been done before. To evaluate how effective the smart objects we develop are, we need to develop a framework for evaluation that considers the different ideas and meanings of social play of different children. In our evaluation studies, we will combine a variety of measurements, such as proximity and orientation of players with qualitative input from parents, teachers and importantly, the children themselves. This will provide us with a holistic and nuanced assessment of how these smart objects changed social play behaviours. The contributions of this research are threefold: firstly, we develop methods to engage mixed groups of children in design processes. Secondly, we develop and build a range of smart objects as case studies, and thirdly, we evaluate these smart objects in a novel way. If this research is successful, we are opening the door to a new kind of technology that can contribute to creating safe, inspiring and inclusive environments for children with mixed abilities and needs.

Social play is one of the key opportunities for children to acquire and test out social skills in self-motivated ways. However, alternative social and cognitive styles often make it difficult for autistic children to join such activities, with significant risks for their development, social inclusion and overall wellbeing. The project "SocialPlayTechnologies" has investigated how interactive, digital technologies can create opportunity spaces for heterogeneous groups of children to make meaningful joint play experiences. To this end, the researchers have engaged groups of autistic and non-autistic children in two integrative schools. In over 50 workshops, the team has involved children in the design and development of such interactive play environments, which do justice to diverse concepts and ideas of "successful" social play. During the project three prototypical system were developed: LightSpaces, MusicPads and PictureStage. Each engages in their own way heterogeneous groups of children in playful ways and creates opportunities for joint play activities. LightSpaces consists of smart textile panels that can be attached by magnets onto existing structures such as chairs or tables. With these, children can create physical spaces that communicate with each other via integrated light effects. MusicPads are a range of pressure sensitive pads that can be arranged on the floor and act as a collaborative musical instrument. PictuerStage is a smart desktop lamp that projects everything that is drawn underneath onto the floor, creating a common play space. All systems were evaluated in a series of studies to assess the impact of the technology onto the play behaviours of children, producing several scientific insights. Firstly, we now know much more about the multi-faceted and ambiguous roles of digital technologies in social play and how they can act as "boundary objects" that afford diverse groups of children access to joint experiences. We further demonstrated, how such roles can be designed for, creating key design knowledge in this area. Secondly, we have extended our methodological knowledge about how to involve heterogeneous groups of children in design processes of technology, making contributions to the field of Participatory Design. Finally, we have created resources for teachers with the aim to allow them to incorporate similar participatory design processes in their own teaching practices after the project has ended.