6. Bravery Tool

This idea could be so fun. I worked with a student a few years ago who was so fascinated with the video game world of Super Mario Brothers that his preferred tasks to engage with on the playground and in the classroom had to relate in some way to Mario. When we were able to set up obstacle courses on the playground that related slightly to the platform game obstacles of Mario, we had success engaging him. But he had immense struggles transitioning into the classroom. While there are many schools of thought on how to support a challenge such as this, more and more we are finding that a strengths based approach, where we utilise the special interest of the child in order to motivate them through situations they find challenging, is by far the most successful. As well, there can be immense knock on effects for how the utilisation of special interests in the development of children can lead to further success in post-school work settings.

Here is my consideration for how ARKit can engage in this space — custom textures that you can apply to the world, through augmented reality. When you approach the school, it is no longer just a school, it is a video game castle. The playground, previously a concrete tarmac, is now a pink field filled with yellow boxes with question marks on them. Through using an augmented reality custom texture that can be applied to the real world environment, the special interests of the children are projected onto their environment in a way that provides with the motivation, the bravery, to engage with it and complete required tasks in this newly themed augmented space.

There would be opportunities here to then scaffold the custom textures away as the child found more and more sustained success in the school environment — at first, the whole classroom might look like a Mario world, but then after the child achieves a level of mastery at following the classroom routine, textures could be reduced so that perhaps only a few Mario graphics remained until, gradually, these too could be removed so the child no longer requires this particular bravery tool. And when another situation arises, a new and uncertain setting that presents as too overwhelming for the children to engage with, the bravery tool comes back out, turning on its augmented reality textures and layering the new and uncertain setting with all the familiar and much loved elements that can be found in the safe and well-understood special interest of the child. Can you imagine a child with autism who, previously unable to enter a shopping centre, has the opportunity to enter the shopping centre as an augmented reality themed Minecraft shopping centre? Let’s grab a pickaxe and pick up some groceries!