The goal of the project was to design an educational play experience intended to mediate social interactions between autism spectrum disorder (ASD) children and neurotypical children ages 6 to 12 years. Additionally, the project was meant to focus on the critical social and language skills needed by the target group, while not being branded as an “autism” product. Overall, the designed experience was supposed to be fun, interesting, and beneficial for both ASD children and their neurotypical peers.
I decided that a browser-based game would be appropriate, since research indicates that computing applications have been successfully used to teach specific communication and social skills to autistic children. The result was Tiki-Tak-Totem, an interactive, two-player, tic-tac-toe-style browser game targeted to children in the 6-8 age group.
Course: Visual Design for Human-Computer Interaction