Student creates video game for children with Asperger's

“The HASO cooperative multiplayer video game model is created in a 2D environment. It integrates a story mode where players with Asperger's syndrome can play independently. It also includes an analysis module to monitor the participants' progress, particularly the development of their social skills. The project will be built using Unity3D.”.

The video game has a natural environment, ideal for sparking creativity and offering various opportunities for fun and social interaction. Furthermore, it will allow children with this condition to engage with the story naturally and enjoyably through visuals.

As the student explained, the idea of the game is to not create barriers to the imagination, so the child can design their environment and whatever they want with different possibilities

“The project is in its first phase, and its leader has defined that the video game will allow these types of patients to play in an open world or sandbox. There they can interact with other children online and be guided by an intuitive and practical reward system that improves their social skills related to the internal context of the video game and gives them insight into their performance in the real world,” the student said.

“Helping children with Asperger's syndrome is vital to taking a further step towards inclusive, quality, and transhuman education through the interactive, viable, and sustainable implementation of ICT in contemporary transmodern education,” highlighted student Miguel Ángel.

“This project promotes the use of technologies such as video games, making use of artificial intelligence, gamification, and interactivity, to propose innovative solutions to real problems,” explained Yudy Amparo Narváez Vallejo, the lead teacher of the research group.

Son inclusion and play

HASO is a video game for people with Asperger's syndrome, a condition known as "invisible," which falls under the autism spectrum and, according to the World Health Organization (WHO), affects 1 in 160 children. However, there are no exact statistics for Colombia.

Teacher Yudy had been researching this syndrome and found it a very interesting topic; she brought it up in the INFOSOFT research group and Miguel Ángel began working on it.

“Medical literature also demonstrates the high learning abilities and capacities of children with Asperger's Syndrome to process any visual content. It has been found that these children perform better socially in a cooperative context with others who may or may not have the condition, something that a video game can perfectly offer, in order to mitigate, to some extent, the effects of social isolation,” the student explained.

The teacher noted that when they started this research, they found that some studies talk about video games as play therapy for children with this condition.

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