This study examines the levels of social interaction of students with high-functioning autism spectrum disorders during collaborative robotics projects. An alternating treatments design was used to observe the duration of social interaction of two middle school children with autism spectrum disorders across robotics and nonrobotics instruction as well as structured versus nonstructured activities. Results show that both participants with autism spectrum disorders engaged in higher levels of social interaction during robotics instruction when compared with nonrobotics instruction sessions. However, one participant displayed significantly higher levels of social interaction during nonstructured activities, indicating that the instructional setting may serve as a conditioned punisher for the student's social interactions.

The current research explored the use of a multimedia shared story to increase the number of correct English and Spanish vocabulary words used by an English language learner with a moderate intellectual disability. A 10-year-old elementary student in a self-contained special education classroom participated in this research. Utilizing the iBooks Author software, personalized shared stories were created on an iPad® for the participant in both English and Spanish. Each story incorporated pictures of items for which the student could not provide a corresponding vocabulary word in either language. The multimedia shared stories were then used to teach these vocabulary words in both English and Spanish. Results showed that the student initially acquired Spanish vocabulary words more quickly, but his English vocabulary words accelerated at a faster rate over the course of the investigation. To support the quantitative data, the students' teacher and paraprofessional were interviewed to determine their experiences and to discuss nuances that occurred over the course of the intervention. Results and implications for future research are discussed.

Training games have many potential benefits for autism spectrum disorder (ASD) intervention, such as increasing motivation and improving the abilities of performing daily living activities, due to their ability to simulate real world scenarios. A more motivating game may stimulate users to play the game more, and it may also result in users performing better in the game. Incorporating users' interests into the game could be a good way to build a motivating game, especially for users with ASD. We propose a Customizable Virtual Human (CVH) which enables users with ASD to easily customize a virtual human and then interact with the CVH in a 3D interaction task. Previous work has shown that users with ASD may have less efficient hand-eye coordination in performing 3D interaction tasks than users without ASD. We developed a hand-eye coordination training game - Imagination Soccer - and presented a user study on adolescents with high functioning ASD to investigate the effects of CVHs. We compare the differences of participants' 3D interaction performances, game performances and user experiences (i.e. presence, involvement, and flow) under CVH and Non-customizable Virtual Human (with randomly generated appearances) conditions. As expected, the results indicated that for users with ASD, CVHs could effectively motivate them to play the game more, and offer a better user experience. Surprisingly, results also showed that the CVHs improved performance in the hand-eye-coordination task users had higher success rate and blocked more soccer balls with the CVH than with a non-customizable virtual human.