A-class: A classroom software with the support for diversity in aptitudes of autistic children

Abstract

The burgeoning growth of the e-Learning technologies implies the fact that the future education system will largely depend upon the electronic devices and computer aided technologies. It has already been proved that the computer aided teaching techniques are much more effective for the children than the traditional teaching system in most of the cases. A large number of software has been designed to assist the teachers in the classroom to teach and evaluate the students. Although those software systems are good enough for a class with normal (neurotypical) children, those very often fail to address the special needs of the autistic children. Hence, the autistic children face various challenges in participating with neurotypicals in the same classroom. We have addressed this problem by designing and implementing an intelligent classroom software, named “A-Class”, which takes care of the diversity of tastes among the autistic children of a classroom and helps the teacher to teach in a class participated by both autistic and neurotypical children. In this paper we discuss the idea, design and implementation of A-Class based upon our five months of intervention with the autistic children at Autism Welfare Foundation (AWF) in Dhaka.