Read, Play and Learn: An Interactive E-book for Children with Autism.

Abstract

Serious games can easily engage students, captivate and maintain their attention allowing them both learning with an adult, or on their own. But, teaching children with developmental disabilities like ASD, requires special set of tools and methods, due to decreased level of attention towards stimuli presented and lessened capability to learn in ways typical children do. Interactive multisensory computer based instruction seems to be a good match for these diverse learners because it offers multisensory learning experience, interactive practice with constant feedback, increased learning opportunities, and customization to each child’s needs. In this paper we present a web-based interactive educational e-book designed to engage a learner with additional auditory-visual stimulation related to the text being read in two languages, and by providing multi layered questions about the story read, for comprehension. Our educational goals were to teach children novel vocabulary, counting, identifying numbers and colors, and responding to inference questions.