vSked: An Interactive Visual Schedule System for use in Classrooms for Children with Autism Michael T. Yeganyan 1 , Meg Cramer 1 , Lou Anne Boyd 2 , Gillian R. Hayes 1 1 Department of Informatics University of California, Irvine {myeganya, mdcramer, gillianrh}@ics.uci.edu 2 North Orange County Special Education Local Plan Area lboyd@ocde.us ABSTRACT Children with autism often experience substantial challenges in understanding, structuring, and predicting the activities in their daily lives. The use of symbols to represent a series of activities, also known as visual schedules, have been shown to be an effective intervention technique for helping individuals with Autism Spectrum Disorder. In this paper, we describe the design and technical architecture for vSked, an interactive visual scheduling tool that allows group interactivity with content generated through end-user programming. We also outline a scenario that demonstrates how vSked extends the benefits of traditional visual schedules through both interactivity and automatic logging of use. This scenario also indicates the type of experience a user might have during a demonstration session. Categories and Subject Descriptors K. Computing Milieux; K.3 Computers and Education; K..3.1 Computer Uses in Education - Computer-assisted instruction (CAI); K.4 Computers and Society; K.4.2 Social Issues - Assistive technologies for persons with disabilities, Handicapped persons/special needs; General Terms Design, Human Factors Keywords Visual schedules, autism, education, assistive technology, children, computer supported collaborative learning INTRODUCTION AND BACKGROUND Visual tools are commonly used as part of interventions for individuals with Autism Spectrum Disorder (ASD). Of these tools, one of the most commonly used is visual schedules, which use visual artifacts and symbols as representations for activities that occur in a given sequence. Use of these visual artifacts, in particular for individuals with ASD, reduces the symptoms associated with cognitive, communication, and social disabilities [1, 2]. Visual schedules can be used in classrooms, homes, and private practice instruction to strengthen sequential memory and language comprehension, while reducing anxiety in children with autism [3, 4, 5]. In schools, visual schedules can assist students with transitioning independently between activities and environments. However, creating and monitoring student use of visual schedules can be a substantial burden for teachers and classroom staff. Often, teachers have neither the time nor the tools to flexibly and dynamically deploy creative lessons during class. Furthermore, teachers lack an easy way to track usage which reduces their ability to reflect on the curriculum and student performance. There has been minimal past work in creating interactive, computational visual schedules. Attempted solutions that use information technology for visual schedules do so with PowerPoint (e.g., [6]). Similarly, for neurotypical students, researchers created Classroom Presenter, a PowerPoint plugin that adds multi-user inking functionality and the potential to insert "quiz" slides into presentations [7]. These general purpose systems, however, do not address many considerations specific to children with autism. We created an interactive visual scheduling system, vSked, that allows for custom design of lessons and activities by teachers and other caregivers. Through participatory design and iterative development, vSked was designed to include the benefits of traditional visual schedules as well as new functionality such as dynamic task creation, various forms of automated reinforcement, and real-time usage tracking. Permission to make digital or hard copies of all or part of this work for personal or classroom use is granted without fee provided that copies are not made or distributed for profit or commercial advantage and that copies bear this notice and the full citation on the first page. To copy otherwise, or republish, to post on servers or to redistribute to lists, requires prior specific permission and/or a fee. IDC 2010, June 9–12, 2010, Barcelona, Spain. Copyright 2010 ACM 978-1-60558-951-0/10/06…$10.00. Figure 1: Common paper based visual schedules.