Paper reading #16: Classroom-Based Assistive Technology

References

Meg Cramer, Sen H. Hirano, Monica Tentori, Michael T. Yeganyan, Gillian R. Hayes. "Classroom-Based Assistive Technology". UIST '10 Proceedings of the 23rd annual ACM symposium on User interface software and technology.  ACM New York, NY, USA ©2010.

 Author Bios

Meg Cramer and Sen Hirano are both currently graduate students in Informatics at UC Irvine in the School of Information and Computer Science.

Monica Tentori is currently an assistant professor in computer science at UABC in Mexico, and is a post-doc scholar at UC Irvine.

 

Michael T. Yeganyan is an Informatics STAR Group Researcher at UC Irvine and hold an MS in Informatics.

Gillian R. Hayes is currently an assistant professor in Informatics in the School of Information and Computer Science at UC Irvine.  She also directs the STAR group.

Summary

• Hypothesis - The vSked system is an improvement over current systems to help autistic students in school.
• Method - There are three main stages in the development of vSked. During each stage, the teachers and aids were interviewed and asked to comment on the system. The students were not directly interacted with, as the demonstrated minimal communication skills. Several pieces of information were taken into account when evaluating the system, such as level of consistency and predictability in the schedule, student anxiety, and teacher awareness. The researchers analyzed data to ensure that the system was seeing to teacher and student needs.
• Results -The results were highly positive. The teachers expressed a large amount of surprise at some of the results. Students were able to learn concept much faster with the images given to them, as well as answer questions deemed too complicated due to the new system. Students were able to progress through the day's activities with much less prompting, and they were much more comfortable with the new calendar system.
• Content - This paper introduced the vSked system, which was engineered towards helping autistic students succeed in school. They tested it by introducing it to a class and interviewing the teachers about student progress and how well the students used the system. The results were positive across the board. It was noted that it was somewhat inflexible, but that it had a lot of room for changes.

 Discussion

Although I am not particularly interested in this kind of technology, this was a large step in a good direction. Helping these students succeed is a great goal. Instead of producing a new type of technology, their aim was to improve existing concepts and implementing them in a real-world environment. They were able to prove that their system was a large improvement over current systems, and it is highly possible this system will be used widely in the future.