I will write about a small project I did on assistive technology, since bigger projects I’ve worked on were more about overcoming technical challenges rather than addressing a social issue. Even through a technical problem, such as improving running time of an algorithm, does influence society (e.g. What solutions are now made viable through this improvement in performance?), I think it’s more beneficial to look at a focused case for this critique exercise.

Through this project, I wanted to provide learning and socializing environment complementary to traditional classroom for children with autism. Many children with autism show high motivation in their fields of interest and starkly low interest in other areas. They often have high sensitivity and many social interactions considered norms in American culture (e.g. eye contact) tend to cause stress. As a result, teachers often characterize children with autism as being distracted, unmotivated in topics outside their interests, and having issues with social interactions.

As one way to help alleviate this problem, my project partner and I built a two-player math game that is highly customizable to fit each child’s field of interest and endorses indirect social interactions through cooperative play. People affected by this problem include children with autism (with enormous variations within this category), parents and family, teachers, and children without autism. At the time, we had input from the first three groups, but did not think about how this may affect other children in the classroom or how the classroom dynamics might be affected if this game and device were to be incorporated into the classroom.

I think the best people to tackle this problem would be a group of teachers from specialized schools that teach only children with autism, teachers that teach a mix of children with and without autism, parents of children with autism, children and adults with autism, education theory specialist, child psychologist, and education policy/law maker. My partner and I were too focused on the problem of alleviating the symptom of children with autism not being integrated into classroom, we did not consider solutions to bigger questions such as what type of classroom structure is suitable, or is it desirable for children with autism to conform to social norms (i.e. is this really a problem to begin with).

The game was designed as an alternative classroom activity. We ran only behavioral studies and the game was not actually implemented in a classroom, but some predictable consequences are: if used as an alternative classroom activity for children with autism, the game may create a sense of division between children with autism and without autism as they participate in separate activities. Also since the game is played on a tablet, it may create some fixation with or dependency on the device, which may steer children away from human-to-human interactions and have them prefer interactions with the device.