Visual Approach For Educating Autistic Children

• Main Author: Ahmad Azahari, Iman Nur Nabila
• Format: Final Year Project
• Language: English
• Published: Universiti Teknologi PETRONAS 2014
• Subjects: T Technology (General)
• Online Access: http://utpedia.utp.edu.my/14357/1/Iman%20Nur%20nadila_%2014804.pdf; http://utpedia.utp.edu.my/14357/

Autism Spectrum Disorders (ASD) are a group of disorders with complex neurological growth disabilities with permanent life-long main characteristics which include overlydependent on others, impairment in communication skills, and troubles in social interaction. It becomes apparent a child has ASD by the time they reach age 3 years old. There is no cure for autistic disorder, however with early intervention and excellent educational practices may result in rapid improvement of child’s skills. Numerous educational practices and approaches have been carried out in order to assist as well as develop these children. One of the new approaches is the Visual Approach, which uses pictures or other visual items to communicate with autistic children, as autistic children are visually oriented. With the rise of mobile technology, visual approach has been implemented in many mobile applications to help these children. Nonetheless, there is no specific mobile application that entirely uses visual approach method, which helps these children with their core drawback that is the lack of independence. Therefore, this project aims to study the best suitable visual approach to assist autistic children in their main difficulties and the methods for it to be implemented in a mobile application. Requirement gathering is done through literature review of research papers, interviews and observations. At the same time, this project methodology is based on Rapid Application Development (RAD), which has an outcome of a project’s prototype. The tool used to develop the prototype is App Inventor and Android Software Development Kit. Later, usability test was conducted with a specialist, teachers and children to examine the effectiveness of the mobile application. The results showed that the respondents were satisfied with the mobile application. It is hoped that the application will assist autistic children in daily routine.