Supervisors info:
Ηρώ Βούλγαρη, Εργαστηριακό Διδακτικό Προσωπικό (Ε.Δι.Π.), Τμήμα Εκπαίδευσης και Αγωγής στην Προσχολική Ηλικία, Σχολή Επιστημών της Αγωγής, Εθνικό και Καποδιστριακό Πανεπιστήμιο Αθηνών
Summary:
Although the interest for autism became more intense over the past few years, autism is not a new phenomenon. Specifically, the investigations for autism started 50 years ago, however people became more interested about autism since it became a topic of cinema movies, conferences, meetings, television discussions and lectures (Kypriotakis, 1995). Autism is classified as a “Pervasive Developmental Disorder that concern the sectors of the development of relationships, the communication and the cognitive functions” of the person (Rutter 1979, 1983, 1990).
One of the issues identified by the study of autism, concerned the play. Specifically, the play of children with autism has been characterized as “impaired”, “inadequate”, “poor” from the researchers, while the interest focused especially to symbolic play. The symbolic play constitutes one of the most important kinds of play for preschool age with great developmental effects for the child. Thus, as we observe that situation from a pedagogical and academic perspective, our interest focused on the symbolic play of children with autism.
At the same time, Augmented Reality (AR) is one of the latest technological developments. Actually, augmented reality systems are seamlessly pervasive even in popular applications, as for instance the Snapchat app. The Augmented Reality has, in essence, the property to complement the real world with virtual elements (Azuma et al, 2001). According to this property, we presumed that the AR can reinforce the autistic children’s symbolisms with the visualization of said symbolisms. Thus, our interest in the investigation of the augmented reality effect in the symbolic game of autistic children, has lead us to formulate game circumstances in order for that effect to be investigated into.
Our interventions took place in a general class of education at kindergarten, which also included an inclusion class. The interventions that took place concerned the symbolic play, with activities designed with the support of augmented reality. Specifically, we used the AR application Aurasma and the program Windows Movie Maker for the processing of the visual materials that are going to be used. The activities were organized for the educational kitchen of the kindergarten and the educational building materials, based on children’s interests.
The methodology that we followed in our research was qualitative and involved collection of qualitative data via observation. The research tools that we used was observation via videotaping, while the analysis was done with the coding method.
The purpose of our research was to investigate whether an augmented reality application could strengthen the engagement and motivation of the children to the symbolic play, and also if AR could support the production of a more qualitative symbolic play by the children with autism.
Our study showed that AR applications have the potential to motivate and engage children with autism and they may also support the symbolic actions of children during play.
Keywords:
Augmented Reality, autism, symbolic play, mobile learning
