Simulation as an innovative teaching pedagogical strategy to resolve the developmental

challenges of autism children

Introduction
Children and adults who are on the autism spectrum experience the world differently
because they were born with various degrees of neurodivergent traits. Most autistic children
have more refined senses and share a deep desire to bring logic into their surroundings. Some
seek repetitive behaviours that follow specific patterns and many appear to be asocial and
avoid eye contact. Autism is not a disease and therefore cannot be cured. Since all our brains
are different and there is an endless range of nuances in their architecture, autism is defined
as a spectrum.
On one side of the spectrum is the mildest form of autism, in the past often also
referred to as Asperger. These children are highly intelligent, and have extreme abilities and
strong interest in specific areas. In the middle are those with average intelligence and some
problems learning new things. On the far end of the spectrum are children with severe
learning disabilities. Children on the spectrum may require various degrees of support in their
daily lives. Our building blocks of learning attention is one of the key foundational skills in
addition to motivation cooperation and imitation. These must be in place before a child can
learn more complex skills like speech play and academics not only that attention continues to
be important from childhood all the way to adulthood as children, we need to pay attention.
When a teacher is teaching and by this not just sitting still but looking at the teacher as well
as understanding what they're saying children also need to pay attention to play with their
toys long enough without running off as adults we need to be able to pay attention in
conversations in meetings or just to get work completed.
Why is attention so difficult for children with autism firstly they may still not yet have
the strong levels of motivation and cooperation necessary to be willing to sit and attend to
something. secondly children with autism are more likely to engage in self-stimulatory or
stimming behaviors. If a child is participating in self-stimulatory behavior or perseverating on
other fixated interests this makes it challenging for the child to be able to focus on a specific
task or conversation often times as well. We've actually seen our kids start to stim when they
are presented with a task that they're not motivated or even find difficult in other words
they're demonstrating task what makes children with ADHD different is that they do not
typically show the social behavioural and language difficulties that children with autism do
demonstrate. when I first started doing autism research the average waiting time for a parent
who's worried that their baby or child might have autism it's about a year and so the challenge
was how do we come up with an app to be able to detect those early symptoms of autism
such as not making eye contact, not having normal facial expressions in a child's home if a
child is diagnosed at 18 to 24 months and provided two years of intervention the average IQ
gain is 17 points so this has a huge impact on people's lives.
Using computer vision machine learning we could help great and automatic
analysis of autism and autism spectrum disorder. Computer vision analysis to assess things
like facial expression and attention and so we built a set of movies that elicit these behaviors
and then we can show these on either a smart phone or a smart tablet and use the camera in
the device to measure the child's response data gets sent off from the phone to the cloud and
then we would be able to analyze that data running through our algorithms to produce our
estimates of where the person is looking now that we have this tool what we hope to do is
combine the eye tracking data at the gaze data along with the motion and jointly see if they
can help in the assessment of the risk of autism.
Families simply don't have access to the professionals that they need the idea that we
could use technology to increase access that's just a wonderful thought to me every minute
every hour that you're able to implement those strategies that's helping your child learn that
social development. “People with ASD can experience some common signs and symptoms
related to ASD, such as difficulty communicating and interacting with others, failure to listen
to and respond to others, being overly focused and getting upset by changes in a routine
(NIMH, 2018). Healthcare settings could also involve long periods of waiting and a great
deal of touch and sound which may be difficult for these children to tolerate (Benich et al.,
2018; Berglund et al., 2017). Additionally, a general lack of staff knowledge and training
regarding how to care for children with ASD can further delay their care and lower their
quality of care (Benich et al., 2018; Berglund et al., 2017; Muskat et al., 2015). Thereby,
children with ASD may experience difficulty and challenges when interacting and socializing
with others within healthcare settings (Berglund et al., 2017).
Stereotypical Mind
Tom, a young boy, can help us understand how living with a neurodivergent mind can
be. His mum noticed early on that her boy would avoid eye contact and that he would often
become upset if she hugged him. He never returned smiles and engaging him in play with
friends often ended in a tantrum. His mother suspected something to be wrong, when Tom
still wasn’t speaking more than two or three words at a time even after turning four years old.
She sought help and Tom was diagnosed with a mild form of autism spectrum disorder, or
ASD for short. Tom has an atypical perception. When reading books or watching movies,
Tom’s brain picks up and organizes the information differently. While his neurotypical peers
categorise things and form schemas - for example, they identify everything with four legs that
barks as a dog. For Tom, each type of dog is unique and categorised in Tom’s mind
individually. His attention to detail and difficulty when generalizing, makes Tom more
objective in his perception of the world and less prone to a framing bias. However, it also
makes all sorts of new experiences incredibly complex, which is why he loves to follow a
rigid daily routine to limit his sensory input. Tom is highly sensitive. His brain amplifies
whatever input it receives he hears everything and has a heightened sense of touch. However,
this superpower makes situations where many people speak simultaneously very challenging.
Tom hears everyone but understands nothing. The sensitivity to touch makes eating an
intense experience. If a texture or flavour is too much to handle, Tom won’t eat it. Also
walking barefoot on wet grass or playing in dirt overwhelms his brain. He has a fascination
with logic.
Tom naturally looks for patterns that bring logic into this world. Sometimes he would
also try to bring order into his own behavior and ways of moving his body. When he
experiences structured patterns breaking, he gets upset. It freaks him out when someone
counts to 8 but doesn’t continue to 10. Doctors call it an obsessive-compulsive disorder or
OCD, which is a different diagnosis but often goes along with autism. Tom experiences
social disconnection. He has trouble connecting with others, because social settings
overwhelm his sensitivity and desire for order. Because human emotions are incredibly
complex and don’t follow a set of predictable patterns, Tom often finds himself misreading
situations and upsetting people around him. As a consequence, he avoids people and rarely
makes eye contact Which doesn’t matter that much to him, since most of the things other
people talk about are illogical, irrelevant and boring anyways. For 4 years, his mother had
him be treated by a therapist who would show him images of faces to help him learn to
identify feelings. By doing this he got better at identifying facial expressions and their
corresponding emotions.
However, personally he is still not very interested in reading faces or establishing new
social contacts. He has two friends who share the same interests and couldn’t wish for more.
Since Tom’s autism is not an illness we can treat, but rather a different way of him
experiencing the world, the question remains whether we should try to change him through
therapy or accept him for who he is. So what do you think? Should we treat children with
autism with therapy or celebrate them for who they are? Or perhaps do both? Maybe it’s not
their atypical minds, but our stereotypical way of looking at them that needs correction? So
here comes the simulation way of approaching things.

Simulation teaching

Live simulation

Constructive simulation

Virtual simulation

Role Play