COSPATIAL · Communication and Social Participation: collaborative Technologies for interaction And Learning

Social competence is a multidimensional concept that reflects a child's capacity to integrate behavioural, cognitive and affective skills in order to adapt flexibly to diverse social contexts anddemands. Social competences affect a child's ability to learn in formal and informal educationalsettings, and to interact appropriately with other children. COSPATIAL aims at providing athorough investigation and further development of technologies aimed at learning these socialskills by children who are typically developing and those with autism. We adopt the Cognitive-Behavioral Therapy (CBT) model to describe the complexity of social competence constructs as amultidimensional framework which assumes reciprocity between the ways individuals behave insocial situations. Two categories of technologies for collaborative interaction that havedemonstrated the potential to be both feasible and effective for training social skills are targeted:Collaborative Virtual Environments and Shared Active Surfaces. Specific objectives are (1) todevelop a framework based on the CBT model that explicitly formulates and illustrates how theattributes of collaborative technologies can be used to support the acquisition of social skills, (2)to validate and refine the CBT framework via extensive user studies that entail specific tasks totest software and hardware systems capable of implementing its salient features, and (3) toinvestigate the ability of collaborative technologies to support the transfer and generalization ofskills acquired during the specific tested tasks to ability to perform other tasks in the real world.COSPATIAL takes inspiration from the Agile approach which posits the need for quickprototyping by small teams of programmers and designers. We exploit this approach to fosterrapid evaluation through several short cycles of Participatory Design, implementation, andevaluation of prototypes by involving psychologists and educators.