School Simulator Autistic Preschool Training App

Press Kit

Unique Properties

School Simulator is an app aiming at supporting parents, teachers and therapists to give preschool training of children with autism spectrum disorder. It mainly contains two parts: preschool training and community communication. Autistic children can get trained in four categories, self care, instruction understanding, interpersonal interaction, and one day in school, which are expected helpful for their future integration into inclusive classes.

Dimensions & Packaging

Designed for iOS system

Tags

Interface Design, Autism Spectrum Disorder, Speech and Gesture, Pre-school Training

Production Technology

Desk research, field studies, focus group interviews, consumer journey map, and collage activities were conducted for the demand analysis part. Figma, Adobe Photoshop and Illustrator were used for the interfaces and interaction design in the project realization.

Design Challenge

The design activity met two challenges: the integration of various training needs, and the design of training lessons. First, though all target autistic children, each of them met different problems in daily life, requiring the variety of content and intensity. Therefore, on the basis of four general training categories, various lessons are provided for users to choose accordingly. Second, since these young children can hardly concentrate for a long period, lessons must be succinct in content, interesting in form, and filled with interactive practice, therefore enhancing the training effectiveness.

Project Duration

The project started in October 2021 and finished in January 2022 in Shenzhen.

Operation Flow

Once the app is launched, users can freely choose training lessons for their children, or communicate with others. In each training lesson, children are encouraged to make choices, talk to cartoon characters, and show specified facial expressions based on the context or cues. The built-in algorithms of speech recognition and facial expression recognition can provide quick and accurate feedback to their responses. Once a wrong response is detected, the corresponding training part will be automatically recorded while encouraging the child to redo it till correct. In addition, users can view the training history with accuracy records and make notes at any time.

Research

We first conducted a desk research, gathering preliminary information towards the autistic children and their common problems in the inclusive education. Second, through a field study, we recorded these children’s emotional problems and behavioral disorders, and observed some intervention methods used. Third, in depth interviews were conducted with experts in autistic research, which made our design focus on the preschool training. Fourth, we made the one-day journey map of a primary school student, exploring various context autistic children may have trouble in, therefore guided the design of training lessons. Finally, we recruited preschool autistic children and collected their preference of colors and cartoon characters via collage activity, used as the reference in the interfaces and characters design. The interfaces and training lessons were constantly iterated in the later evaluations.

Inspiration

School Simulator was inspired by the special needs of autistic children in the inclusive education. In an inclusive school, these children can sit in the same classrooms and join learning activities together with their typically developing peers. However, due to the disorder of emotion and social behavior, it always takes them longer time to get used to the schedule and environment around. We realized the meaningful effects of preschool training for the autistic children.

Colors of School Simulator Autistic Preschool Training App