Auti-mate.com will host a collection of games that will cover a wide spectrum of autistic savant skills, such as visual analytic skills, understanding of mechanical systems, memory and systematic thinking.
Auti-mate.com is a first-of-its-kind tool that enables parents to work on their autistic child’s strengths.
The prototype includes two games. Blocks, an advanced puzzle game that builds on the autistic talent in visual thinking. The other game, Gears is about understanding clockwork-like mechanical systems.
The game prototypes also feature a finely tuned autism friendly user interface and gameplay. The design is highly structured and predictable, enabling the players to focus exclusively on the task. It provides a rewarding and relaxing gaming experience, in which school-aged children with autism can experience their strong side and succeed.
Auti-mate.com aims to have a working product available by Christmas this year. I was incredibly lucky to be able to get in touch with co-founder, Samuel Toth, and he answered some of our questions.
What was the inspiration/vision behind setting up Auti-mate?
Auti-mate helps to discover and cultivate the cognitive strengths of people on the autism spectrum. These serious games were designed to rely on cognitive skills that are potential talents of autistic children. While the children have a great engaging time, parents and therapists get a great overview of where the strengths of that particular child are. By finding talent skills children are empowered to find their productive roles in society and become independent adults.
We know a great number of exceptional autistic talents from the past (e.g. Isaac Newton, Albert Einstein) and from the present (e.g. Stephen Wiltshire or Daniel Tammet), and if investigated with scientific rigour 28.5% of individuals with autism show extraordinary cognitive abilities (Howling et al. 2009). Yet, these assets are rarely discovered by parents and therapists and even more rarely developed into a full blown productivity asset for adults on the autism spectrum.
We need to empower children to find their strengths and to develop those into real life assets. The serious games of Auti-mate assess cognitive skills that are likely to be above average in autism and the games help to improve those skills further.
We are 3 Hungarian guys living and working across Europe with passion to build smart products to solve social problems.
Samuel Tóth, software designer – Samuel started his career as a developer, now he works as a digital product designer. He worked for several years in start-up environments, has experience in game development, digital marketing, and productivity tools. Enthusiastic about simple and clean design. His niece who lives with autism inspired him to found Auti-mate.
Ognjen Bubalo, software engineer – Ogi is an experienced software engineer with several different technology skills. He’s worked at many top companies, also participated open source projects as parts of Google Summer of Code. His main motivation comes from his brother with autism.
Zsombor Várnagy-Tóth, psychologist – Zsombor has worked in Hungary’s top university (ELTE) in the field of autism for 6 years. His research topic is how the brain of people with autism process information. He is especially interested what is in autism that leads to talent and disability in the same time. He worked on various software for people with autism, including a tool that aims to diagnose those cases that are otherwise would remain hidden a smartphone app, called HANDS, that was designed to help teenagers to follow schedules and do smaller tasks independently.
The team did evidence based testing of the effectiveness of these tools, including randomised controlled trials and eye-tracking technology.
Currently he works as a UX researcher, and he is among the first people on Earth who have ever done user testing and usability research regarding the special needs of people with autism.
Continues Here
Our games are available on http://auti-mate.com. We are in the early phase yet, the games are not optimised to mobile and tablet devices yet.
How did you come up with the games Blocks and Gears? Where individuals with autism involved in the planning process?
The two prototype games Blocks and Gears aim at autistic savant skills.
Blocks is a puzzle game that was inspired by the work of Samuel Calmin Kohs, an American psychologist, who created this intelligence testing task in the 1920’s. It measures visual analytic skills. As research shows (e.g. Shah and Frith, 1993) people with autism often perform in this task better than 98% of the rest of us. For example an autistic person with an IQ of 60 may perform as if he had an IQ of 150. In real life such visual analytic skills enable engineers to decompose complex structures into components.
Gears features a number of cogwheels that together compose a mechanical system — a small clockwork. The seminal research of Simon Baron-Cohen and his colleagues show that there is a strong link between engineering talent and autism. There are more than twice as many (28.4%) engineers in the family of people with autism than in other families (15%) (Baron-Cohen, Wheelwright, Stott, Bolton & Goodyer, 1997). And also autism occurs more frequently in the family of physicists, mathematicians and engineers (Baron-Cohen, Bolton, Wheelwright, Scahill, Short, Mead & Smith, 1998). People with autism are hypothesized to have a talent in understanding deterministic systems, such as clockworks.
We test our games regularly with individuals with autism, so that the software is usable for a wide audience. Many software are made by parents who tailor them for the needs of their own child, and unfortunately such software may not work at all for anybody else.
Our future games (with possible exceptions) are also tapping the autistic savant skills: visual thinking, understanding systems, exceptional memory, attention to detail, and focus. We have tons of ideas for the new games inspired by real-life activities, studies, psychological tests, field of interests and other video games.
In addition to the games we will implement features to create a structured and predictable environment for the children. For example, with the “timer feature” parents can set time limit to the game, so when the given time is up it is no need for the parents to cut the gaming abruptly, but the game comes to its natural end, smoothly and gracefully.
How can our readers become involved?
We are continuously looking for feedback and support from everyone. Readers can send their thoughts to samuel.toth@auti-mate.com; we are going to answer every e-mail.
Is there anything else that you would like to share with us?
Auti-mate was one of the 15 finalists of Social Innovation Tournament by European Investment Bank 2014, and we also participated to ITASD (Digital solutions for people with autism) conference in Paris 2014.
For those who are interested about Auti-mate’s updates, you can keep up to date by following on Facebook https://www.facebook.com/auti.mate.games?fref=ts
Auti-mate website – https://auti-mate.com/#/socialLogin