Children with autism have problems with communication and social interactions, which can make them, feel isolated from the rest of the world.  They have impaired interpretation skills with regards to emotional signals in themselves or others.  There are techniques and paper and card based games that are available to teachers and specialists to use to improve social skills in autistic children, and found the children also tend to enjoy using the computer. The main aim for this final year project was to develop a multimedia application that would have the potential to be used as a tool to educate social behavioural skills.  A multimedia application designed for autistic children, which demonstrated acceptable social behaviour, with the purpose of improving the user’s social skills

CLIENT REQUIREMENTS

The client from Autistic Research, part of the Sunderland University, called Paul Whiteley.  Required a multimedia software product that children with autism could interact with, to develop a multimedia software product that would motivate their willingness and enthusiasm to learn and extend their social skills.  To develop a system for the user to interact with, on a one to one basis or in small groups with a facilitator to keep the focus on the learning outcomes, and the users attentions on the application.  The requirements for the project, was to design a multimedia product that would contain avatars for the children to select and for the user to be immersed in an animated cartoon environment.  An application that would include appropriate multimedia content to make the software more entertaining, for the software to have stimulating challenges and exercises, for the user to learn from in a fun and entertaining way, in a comfortable environment that they feel save and not threatened. 

The challenges would consist of realistic animated scenarios regarding social interactions that the user may have encountered in their own day to day lives.   An application that would have a simple, colourful and intuitive menu system, that was easy to use.  To motivate the children to use the software to have eye catching colours and a layout that was consistent so not to frustrate the users.  The client required an application to focus on a certain aspect of social behaviour selecting only one of the following:

• Friendship
• Honesty
• Politeness

ACTIVITIES

Particular design and management tools were used for the development of the application,which were as followed:

• Research into autism and multimedia learning for people with autism
• Competitor analysis for learning applications, avatar menu systems and drawing styles
• Mindmap to decompose issues for the challenges
• Structure chart to determine flow of the navigation
• Schedule and gantt chart for organising workload and time
• Learning logs for evaluation
• Blackbox testing to check for errors
• Storyboards and screen layouts to demonstrate my ideas to the client
• Use HCI principles for designing the interface

This project did provide challenges, the first was learning to use Adobe Flash in more depth, to determine how much of my Adobe Director skills were transferable. There were problems with the action script, especially with global variables not functioning correctly. The other problem was time, with regards to the projects development and not having enough time as I would have wished to spend on it, due to external factors, which meant the schedule needed to be revised