Visual Approach For Educating Autistic Children

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.