Combining Computational Thinking and Chibitronics and Makey Makey to Develop a Social Story Teaching Aid System to Improve Social Reciprocity and Emotional Expression Skills for Autistic Children

Abstract

This study is aimed to teach autistic children to learn social reciprocity and emotional expression through social stories, and build a social story teaching aid system with the aid of sequential computational thinking as learning strategy as well as Chibitronics and Makey Makey. This system can make autistic children to learn situational content from social stories, understand the social stories through computational thinking and arrange corresponding sequential structure. In this study, we recruited three 9 year-old autistic children, carried out teaching experiments four times and observed their behavior for story plot. It showed that technical teaching aid can improve autistic children's learning motivation and interests and provide them with contextual cue of social situation, helping build their social recognition and social reciprocity into social situation and their social reciprocity skills. I believe that autistic children can improve their social reciprocity and emotional expression skills with the help of sequential computational thinking and social teaching aid system designed with Chibitronics and Makey Makey.