Asistranto: An Assistive Educational Platform for Promotion of Interest in Autistic Children

Abstract

Asistranto is an assistive educational platform that involves information and communication technology in the education, engineering and models of affective computing, and its name is a translation of the word “assistance” into the Esperanto language. This platform was developed based on Vygotsky’s socio-historical theory in order to promote the affective state of interest and joint attention scenes in children with autistic spectrum disorder (ASD). ASD leads the child to developmental deficit condition, with manifestation scale in the behavioral, communicative and in some cases cognitive domains. The interest and joint-attention deficits in children with ASD are also manifestations widely mentioned in the literature. The qualitative methodology is used with case study of multiple cases. An educational storytelling activity was developed using a product called Electronic Puppet, created on the Asistranto Platform. Four storytelling with Electronic Puppet was presented to four autistic students from 7th and 8th grade, limited to 16 cases. The results showed that Asistranto’s Electronic Puppet promoted over 80% of joint attention scenes, and an increase of three positive cases without technology to nearly 10 with Electronic Puppet, representing a gain of over 200%. In addition, 83% of the cases presented positive indicative of affective state of interest. This confirms the importance of Asistranto as a contextualized technological support for communicative and joint attention activities.