Creating a software to promote understanding about narrative in children with autism: Reflecting on the design of feedback and opportunities to reason

TouchStory is a software game that aims at improving the understanding of narrative by children with autism. In fact, the underlying conceptual framework intends to investigate to what extent we can improve the children´s understanding of narrative through the introduction of simple game-like tasks that address primitive components of narrative. The game has strong analogies with the concrete, physical world. Our design approach, following our knowledge regarding this particular group of learners, was to ´keep things simple´, introducing features only if necessary to provide each individual child with a focussed and enjoyable game, from which that particular child may learn about, or absorb, (or become more familiar with) primitive components of narrative. In this paper we concentrate on issues of reward, feedback, and opportunities for reasoning (about the task and/or their own performance) provided by software. We present results from the first 7 visits of an ongoing longitudinal study involving 6 children each with a diagnosis of autism. We consider the children´s apparent engagement with TouchStory, and in particular, we focus on the strategy each child adopts and consequent feedback from the software. This analysis prompted us to further reflect on the specificities of this group of children and the challenges to create supportive learning environments.