Insights from special needs teaching staff on development of an iPad app to teach emotion recognition to children with autism spectrum disorder

Many psychological studies have suggested that children with autism have trouble recognising emotion from facial expressions. Children with high functioning autism can be taught to recognise facial expressions but may fail to apply this learning when they encounter subtle versions of these expressions in everyday life. We are developing an iPad app to deliver teaching about subtle emotional expressions to children with autism. As part of the design process we have conducted two focus groups with teaching staff (N=5) at a school for children with special educational needs in the UK. In the focus groups, teaching staff used a prototype version of the app and were invited to give their opinions. Focus group discussions were recorded and analysed using qualitative methods. These suggested that the app has potential to be used in a classroom setting with individuals with ASD but also provided important insights into how the app should be designed. Changes introduced after these discussions included reducing distractions, adding alternative forms of feedback, and linking the app to other existing teaching aids. The app has now been redesigned and this version is presented along with detailed results of the qualitative analysis. The redesigned app is now being used by teaching staff in the school for special needs and future work will evaluate its effectiveness as a teaching tool.