An L3D project funded by the Coleman Institute
Clever logo CLever Building cognitive levers to help people help themselves
 
Home page
  
CLever Projects
  
CLever Publications
  
Clever Documents
  
Clever Resources
  
About us
  
Contact information
Non-critical disjointed rollovers

Return to main projects page

Suggestions from Stefan Carmien

EDC & Autism and Physical vs. Screen Turtles
A system for autistic children that implements and extends the discoveries related in the use of logo in the book "Cultivating Minds" by Silvia Weir. This book has several interesting statements in the chapter A Structured Environment for Autistic Children:
  1. "Our purpose in introducing computers to this particular population was to see whether it would make their learning more meaningful to them. The successes or failures, when they came, tended to be unequivocal. There is the suggestion, then, that work on machines is particularly appropriate for the autistic group, in spite of their low IQ as measured." (p. 154)

  2. "For many of these children, the response was slow until we acquired a mechanical turtle." (Note: the logo environment was either on a terminal or a 'robot' turtle that could roll around the floor) "the dramatic response of both the autistic and non-autistic children to this physically present, concrete, three-dimensional object was one of the most striking features of the work with this group of low-functioning children." (p.155)

  3. "As before, the use of numbers forms an interesting cognitive focus. Whereas numbers in their regular class work tended to be used in a rote-like fashion, in Logo, choosing a particular number and seeing it do a particular job of work made numbers come alive for the students." (p.155)
There is much to be done in researching the areas of theory and work already done, but this simple combination of ideas and our expertise with 3-D objects in L3D (i.e. EDC etc.) seems to hold promise.

Pat Howland Mind Reading - Make an EDC Tool
Patricia Howland in her book "Teaching Children with Autism to Mind-Read" (1999) in discussing previous attempts to improve social and communicative deficits in autism states that "the interventions that have proven most successful are those involving a high degree of structure, with a focus on the development of more appropriate social and communication skills." Basing her guide from a discussion of the 'theory of mind' deficits "which is defined as the ability to infer other peoples mental states ... and the ability to use this information" she proposed and teaches a simple set of drills to inculcate the functionality of this ability, if not the reality of those conscious states. "The authors provide practical guidelines for helping children with autism spectrum conditions to improve their understanding of beliefs, emotions, and pretense." (From the back of the book) Notwithstanding the very interesting implications to AI and psychological theories of consciousness, the exercises in this book are simple and eminently suitable to EDC type action/reflection space programming techniques. The next step for me is to more closely read about the techniques and how the professional world has received her ideas. She is mentioned in several bibliographies and has credentials so this could be an avenue for research and perhaps a project.


Suggestions from Gerhard Fischer

Experience Journal: allowing communities/families which have to deal with a specific kind of disability to share information and life stories starting points:
 Personalization: creating a link between the e-commerce business of BEA and personalization of specific groups of disabled people starting points:
  • Theory/Objectives: universal access, design for all
  • Related work: research in user modeling (see papers -- Stephanidis C.: "Adaptive techniques for universal access"; Fischer, G.: "User Modeling and Human Computer Interaction")
  • Next events: talk by Ryan Martens (BEA Boulder), Wed 3/1/2000
Symposium: to invite a number of people working in this area to come together in June 2000 to assess the start of the art, discuss needs, opportunities, etc.


Suggestions from Anja S. Kintsch

Add speech recognition to existing systems. There are lots of possibilities here. One valuable system would be a reading tutor to correct and provide help to the reader, much as a human tutor does.

Systems to enable living alone: e.g., provide instructions for living, enable people to control their environment (turn off lights, check if door is locked). E.g., show schedule -> it is bedtime now -> steps involved in preparing for bed -> check lights, etc. Such a system must be picture based! Even though some of the kids can read, they don't comprehend well enough and prefer pictorial mode.

An environment that would allow teacher to put together picture based systems; i.e. a library of pictures, easy procedures for composition, building menus, etc. This would allow teacher to quickly generate communicative messages that are individualized and situation specific.

Last updated: November 25, 2002
This site is maintained by the Center for LifeLong Learning and Design
Direct any questions or comments regarding this site to the L3D Webmaster