VLSS – Virtual Learning and Social Stories for children with autism Christina Volioti Department of Informatics Aristotle University of Thessaloniki Thessaloniki, Greece christina.volioti@uom.edu.gr Thrasyvoulos Tsiatsos Department of Informatics Aristotle University of Thessaloniki Thessaloniki, Greece tsiatsos@csd.auth.gr Sophia Mavropoulou Department of Special Education University of Thessaly Volos, Greece smavrop@uth.gr Charalampos Karagiannidis Department of Special Education University of Thessaly Volos, Greece karagian@uth.gr Abstract—This paper presents the design, implementation and educational use of a virtual learning environment which supports children with Autism Spectrum Disorders (ASD) to learn to solve social problems presented in the format of Social Stories. The pilot evaluation revealed that the environment has the potential to be a beneficial and easy-to-use educational tool for teaching social problem solving to children with ASD. Keywords-Virtual Learning Environments, Autism Spectrum Disorders, Social Stories, Social Problem Solving I. INTRODUCTION Virtual Reality (VR) and Virtual Learning Environments (VLE) facilitate innovative teaching and engaging learning activities and have been widely used to support the educational process. The use of VLE has been also recommended as a useful teaching approach for children with Autism Spectrum Disorders (ASD). In particular, VLE have the following advantages, highlighting their beneficial value for this special group of learners: They provide a stable, secure and controlled environment, in the sense that children with ASD can make errors without facing the unexpected consequences of the real world [1], [2], [3]; They facilitate knowledge and skill generalization through easily made controlled adjustments / adaptations to enable real-life applications [1], [2], [3]; They enhance the communication of children with ASD through virtual representations (avatars), which are non-intrusive means of interaction [3]; They provide a quite realistic representation of reality, which promotes mental simulation and therefore contributes to the improvement of social problem solving [4]; They present virtual agents, which can be programmed to generate consistent and predictable responses, encouraging children when they make errors and reducing their stress [5]. Furthermore, virtual agents versus humans have stable tone of voice and use constant expressions [6], [7], as well as they never get tired or frustrated; They allow the customization of the input stimuli (such as sound, colours, etc.), according to the preferences and needs of children with ASD [3], thereby serving the need for an individualized learning environment [2]; and they can increase users’ task engagement [4]. In the last decade, VR and VLE have been used successfully in applied educational research with individuals with ASD [8], [9]. Drawing from this theoretical and empirical trend in the literature, this paper focuses on a three- dimensional VLE for children with ASD, which is based on the use of Social Stories to help children with ASD to learn to solve social problems. II. VLES AND PEOPLE WITH ASD There is an increasing number of studies examining the potential benefits of VLE for the education of children with ASD. VLE are considered to be particularly effective with these children, because they provide an ideal method for social skills training [10]. VLE have been successfully applied in social skills instruction, such as the development of AS Interactive, which is a Single-User Virtual Café [7], [11], and the COSPATIAL project, which incorporated both social skills and the method of collaborative problem solving [8], [12]. Milne and her colleagues developed the application “Thinking Head”, which realistically depicted a tutor – virtual agent so that children with ASD could learn to recognize facial expressions [13]. Other researchers used virtual agents in the educational process such as “Baldi” [1] and “Sam” [14], which facilitated language and social skills in children with ASD. Also, humanoid avatars have been employed to examine if children with ASD could understand basic emotions [9], develop their empathy [15], as well as enhance their communication skills (i.e. verbal and text- communication) [16], [17], [18]. Further research, demonstrating the potential value of the VLE, aimed at teaching multi-tasking [19], as well as life skills [20], such as fire and tornado safety skills [21], appreciating fire risk and the need for building evacuation [22]. Evidently, VLE seem to motivate children with ASD to participate with enthusiasm and pleasure in the educational process [5], [16], [23]. In addition, the use of VLE has been found to improve children’s performance during the educational intervention, leading to more efficient learning [11], [14] as well as generalization of knowledge [1]. Moreover, a few multimedia tools presenting personalized Social Stories (SS) for children with ASD have been implemented with success [24]. Despite all the aforementioned research approaches, little research has been carried out until now, combining VLE and SS for developing social problem solving skills in children with ASD. Considering the merits of VLE, it can be proposed that educational interventions based on exploiting both VLE and SS, could offer valuable support to children with ASD. In this respect, this paper focuses on the empirical evaluation by 2014 IEEE 14th International Conference on Advanced Learning Technologies 978-1-4799-4038-7/14 $31.00 © 2014 IEEE DOI 10.1109/ICALT.2014.177 606