Educational Software as Assistive Technologies for Children with Autism Spectrum Disorder

摘要

Nowadays, some developing countries are experiencing many problems regarding children with Autism Spectrum Disorder, including Indonesia. Autism Spectrum Disorder is a childhood-onset developmental disorder of the immature brain, which impairs social communication and social interactions in addition to persistent restricted, repetitive patterns of behavior or interests. Children with Autism Spectrum Disorder need special treatments, such as therapy by professional and certified therapists. However, there are limitations to the number of therapists and the therapists have difficulty using therapeutic tools that require extra preparation time, also there are only a few applications that help therapists to carry out the therapy for Autism Spectrum Disorder children, especially applications that are developed in Indonesian and have complete features. Therefore, in this study, we proposed Squizzy, which is an assistive technology application that specifically designed as educational software for children with Autism Spectrum Disorder and developed in a tablet environment. During the development of Squizzy, we implemented Scrum methodology that will be explained in detail later. Based on the evaluation and discussion that conducted, Squizzy received many positive feedbacks from users, such as it helps therapists and parents to ease their therapy sessions by reducing the inconvenience of the therapeutic tool. Moreover, Squizzy successfully covered the cognitive part of children’s therapy.