Researchers from the Faculty of Informatics at the National University of Comahue (UNComa), in Neuquén, have developed a web platform to teach programming to children with autism. The objective is to generate tools that do not exist in the traditional educational system and to promote a more inclusive future professional insertion. The application, baptized with the name of Pasayo, has already been tested by twenty families with good results and scientists are working to extend its reach to the entire province.
“With Pasayo we thought of a different role for young people on the autism spectrum for the future. Today they are consumers of technology, but they do not have a productive role. As we had been researching computer learning processes in childhood, we thought we could give society an answer to this question,” she says. Federico AmigoneUNComa researcher and project coordinator.
The idea came about four years ago, when Amigone started looking for tools that would allow his son, a boy with autism, to develop programming skills.. When he didn’t find anything, he raised the need with the research group and they started working on developing a platform to fill this vacancy.
But that was just the starting point that led to the creation of a larger project: the Passayo School, a support and learning space for families with children and young people on the autism spectrum who want to develop programming skills. Furthermore, they created Computing Science Citizenship Communitya team formed not only by researchers from the University, but also by anyone who wants to participate in the collective construction of knowledge.
In this sense, Amigone explains: “We are convinced that that there are issues such as the labor insertion of people with autism that cannot be resolved locked in the cloisters of the academy. We felt we needed to bring citizen actors into the investigative process.”
like a story
Pasayo is a free web platform that works with the concept of narrative transposition. A story or story that presents a problem is inserted so that, after performing a series of actions, it results in an executable solution to the proposed problem. The platform is divided into three levels: Tangible, Blocks and Textual.
Tangible is a first approach to the world of programming and is made with objects that can be touched. “It’s a kind of board game with pictograms, a resource often used with communities on the autism spectrum due to difficulties in speech development”, says the researcher. In this modality, the idea is to group tiles in different ways so that an avatar moves according to these instructions. Although the duration of each level depends on the individual process of each child, the approximate time for this stage is one or two months..
The next level is Blocks and it’s done on a computer. It consists of several figures that must be dragged with the mouse to build an executable program. This module can take longer, from a few months to a year or moredepending on what the student needs. Finallythe Textual level already implies programming in industrial language. JavaScript is used here, one of the most used in the computer industry.
Education for the whole family
Making programming a more accessible process for children with autism is not an easy challenge. “It is something we are still learning and one of the complexities is that the learning process does not need to be mediated by discourse”, says Amigone. In other words, you cannot start by explaining the theory, as traditionally done, but it is necessary to create other elements that the boy can manipulate to the satisfaction. Furthermore, courses with a specific duration are not useful for these cases, as the teaching and learning times are different.
In this way, It’s not just about teaching programming to children with autism, but also to their families.. To follow the process, Pasayo School has facilitators who do not interact directly with the child, but with their fathers, mothers, guardians or therapeutic companions. Through virtual meetings, the facilitator explains the activity to the family member, who will be in charge of working on the content at the moment he deems most appropriate. The following week, returns and corresponding adjustments are made to advance the process.
Programming a better world
So far, the platform has been tested by twenty families distributed mainly in the Río Negro and Neuquén region, with a very wide age range, from 6 to 24 years old. “In the 2022 cohort, the experiences were very stimulating and gave us the standard we have to continue on this path. We had around 300 instances of facilitation that produced around 200 executable programs made by children and young people with autism”, says the project coordinator.
From the returns, they observed that there were different experiences. Some weren’t interested in learning these types of skills and some were. “One of the hallmarks of autism is that they have their own agenda of interests and the computer may not be one of them.. For those interested, we received great feedback and parents were excited because today there are only clinical therapies but there is a huge lack of job prospects, ”she says. The researcher says that they received public and private contributions, but also carried out a large part of the work pro bono. In the private sphere, they obtained financial support from some technology companies in the area.
The Pasayo team is currently working with the Neuquén Development Innovation Agency, the Nation’s Federal Investment Council, and the UNComa Foundation to launch the school throughout the province of Neuquén. This will allow expand the reach of the platform and also generate relevant data for the advancement of the research field. In addition, they are making an agreement with a municipality in Córdoba to create a new school headquarters there.
“In the coming months, we will be working to bring the school to the entire province of Neuquén, which will be a great challenge.. We also want to continue strengthening the network with technology companies to involve them in the subject from the beginning, because there is no point in training the best programmers if the companies do not take them later”, says Amigone.