Autism and Video Games

Hi,
I am a father and educator with three adolescent sons who have autism to different degrees. I have a website for parents who have recently discovered their child to have autism(http://www.keefamily.org) The purpose of starting the blog is to share with parents, teachers and educators, who wants to try using video games to help adolescent autistic children to learn. Most of the interventions and curriculum that I am aware of focuses mainly on early childhood and may not be suitable to motivate and interest them to learn for life.

My rationale stems from the observation I have of my three sons who are able to play and achieve some level of success with Nintendo DS and WII games without the need to first read the game manual or refer to game hint books, which I will normally need to before I play. Their interest and perseverance in some games of interest have lead them intuitively not only to discover the properties, rules and procedures that must be mastered in order to become a “player”(Rosas, R., et al, 2003) but also to win the games.

I am excited about this observation and would like to explore how to determine suitable existing Nintendo games for adolescent autistic children that may have the potential to bring about development of desired cognitive processes(e.g. meaning, self-regulation, incidental learning, conceptualization, motivation and higher-order processing) and whether it is possible to extend the learning to learning of suitable curriculum (e.g. expressive language, mathematical concepts, music) for adolescent autistic children.

How has it been addressed in the literature?

Many people with autism are highly interested and motivated by computers and computer-assisted learning can focus on numerous academic and support areas of need such as emotion recognition, social interaction, and communication (Goodwin, 2008; Passerino & Santarosa, 2008). Educational computer games can be dispensed with great success for the right tasks but have clear limitations and require qualified teachers that can serve as facilitators of learning (Egenfeld-nielsen, 2007). However, video games are clearly a preferred game for children who reach game-playing age as they dominate much of the toy industry and have become a cultural and social force that shape children and adolescents’ lifestyle(Provenzo, 1992 cited in Rosas, R. et al., 2003, Rebetez C. & Betrancourt, M., 2007). This probably stems from the ease to use, portable hardware with instructional and entertaining software(Garret & Ezzo, 1996 cited in Rosas, R. et al., 2003). The features that make video games effective such as clear goal, high speed, independence from physical laws and holding power (Rosas, R. et al., 2003) are likely to make it attractive to autistic children too. Baron-Cohen(1997, cited in Wakabayashi, et al.,2007) revealed that autistic people do not have impairment in their understanding of physical causality, and may even be superior relative to mental-age matched controls.