Paper Reading #16- Classroom-based assistive technology: collective use of interactive visual schedules by students with autism

Title: Classroom-based assistive technology: collective use of interactive visual schedules by students with autism
Reference Information:
Meg Cramer, Sen Hirano, Monica Tentori, Michael Yeganyan, and Gillian Hayes. "Classroom-based assistive technology: collective use of interactive visual schedules by students with autism". CHI '11 Proceedings of the 2011 annual conference on Human factors in computing systems ACM New York, NY, USA ©2011. ISBN: 978-1-4503-0228-9.
Author Bios:
Meg Cramer- A graduate student at UC Irvine in the School of Information and Computer Sciences. Her advisor is Gillian Hayes.
Sen Hirano- He is a first-year PhD student in the department of  Informatics at the School of Information and Computer Science at the University of California, Irvine. His advisor is Dr. Gillian Hayes.
Monica Tentori- I am an assistant professor in computer science at UABC, Ensenada, México and a post-doctoral scholar at University of California, Irvine (UCI).
Michael Yeganyan-UC Irvine researcher for the Informatics STAR Research Group. Currently developing vSked, an assistive technology for children with autism, to be used in classrooms for child development.
Gillian Hayes- I am an Assistant Professor in Informatics in the School of Information and Computer Sciences and in the Department of Education at UC Irvine. My research interests are in human-computer interaction, ubiquitous computing,assistive and educational technologies and medical informatics.
Summary:

• Hypothesis: If vSked is given a chance and becomes widely implemented, then it can promote student independence, reduce the quantity of educatorinitiated prompts, encourage consistency and predictability, reduce the time required to transition from one activity to another, and reduce the coordination required in the classroom.
• Methods: The authors created a visual schedule on vSked for students using symbols or pictures to represent activities in the order in which the are scheduled for the day. For students with speaking impediments, communication boards allow those students to interact and participate in activities via voice or interaction with the functionality on the vSked device. A token-based reward system is also established on vSked to encourage students to stay on task, stay participating, and to stay involved. Each positive behavior displayed is recorded by vSked and tokens are added to the student's record. These tokens can add up to actual rewards that can be earned. The vSked system consists of a large touch screen monitor at the front of the class grouped with many miniature touch screen PCs for each of the students to interact with. All of the information within the system is connected. To accurately evaluate the effectiveness of vSked in the initial implementation stages, the authors conducted some experiments on sample sets of students.
• Results: The results of the studies conducted by the authors on not only the students, but the teachers using the system as well, included a 2-week period before deployment as well as a 1-week period during deployment during the spring and summer semesters. The results showed that the students were more motivated to respond to questions and to progress to see what happens after each question is answered and also to pay attention to ask task, focusing on answering each specific question. It was also found that the students also preferred using the vSked because of its immediate rewarding of students with correct answers via firework graphics. There is no such capabilities with a simple pen-and-paper system. The authors also found that vSked allowed the students to basically "run their own day". The token-based system, each student's schedule, and trask transitions were now in the hands of vSked and of each individual student. The teachers didn't have to spend a lot of time bookkeeping these things and could focus more on other things that could be done. When rewards were earned, fireworks would display on the large screen in the front of the class so everyone could see. This would sometimes result in cheering from all the students (which is apparenlty rare among autistic students to be socially supportive/aware). Students are also now aware of how each other student is doing in the class. Often times, students were also found sharing tablets or looking at each other's tablets to see how a task was going.
• Content: The authors of vSked wanted to create something to allow for a better, more enhanced learning environment for the specially educated children. So they had a vision to create a technology to integrate many individual features of a special education classroom and integrate them all. Through their implementation of a large TV screen centrally located in the classroom connected to many individual PCs for each student, it allows not only individuality and independence for each student to stay on top of things, but it also allows each student to see where they are relative to the whole class and to share experiences and skills with one another that was not previously seen prior to the vSked system.

Discussion:
I really liked this idea and how successful vSked was. Even though there were so many ways that were recorded in which vSked was successful, I believe there are still so many unexplored avenues in which vSked affects the students in social/psychological ways that were maybe unintended upon creation of the vSked (in positive ways). I believe the authors definitely met their goals and possibly even surpassed them when they conducted their studies and analyzed their feedback from trial classroom agents. I believe the authors were able to connect to the students more effectively with their technology then with traditional pen-and-paper systems. It seemed to intrigue the students more than usual for most activities. I like how the vSked is also allowing the students to develop their skills such as social interactions and maintaining their intelligence and independence, too.