09/01/2007
Cartoons launched to help children with autism
A new animated DVD which aims to help autistic children understand human emotions is being launched nationwide.
'The Transporters' DVD, which has been commissioned by Culture Online, part of the Department for Culture, Media and Sport, aims to help children with autism to look at the human face and to learn about emotions.
The DVD was created from research conducted by the Autism Research Centre at Cambridge University. Children with autism tend to avoid looking at human faces and find it hard to understand why facial features move in the way that they do.
Research by Dr Ofer Golan and Professor Simon Baron-Cohen found that following a four-week period of watching the DVD for 15 minutes a day, children with high-functioning autism caught up with typically developing children of the same age in their performance on emotion recognition tasks.
Children with autism are often fascinated by rotating wheels, spinning tops, rotating fans and mechanical, lawful motion, preferring predictable patterns. The toy vehicles featured in The Transporters run on tracks or lines and display 15 emotions, including happy, sad, angry, afraid, excited, unfriendly, kind, sorry, proud, jealous, and joking.
The DVD, which is aimed at 2 to 8-year-olds and narrated by Stephen Fry, also includes an associated interactive quiz to help the child learn about the featured emotion.
One parent who participated in the clinical trials said that there had been a change in the behaviour, speech and range of emotional expressions in their autistic son since he began watching the DVD. They said: "It's a bit like someone's flicked a switch in his head."
30,000 DVDs will be supplied to families with autistic children and copies can be requested from the web-site at: www.transporters.tv
(KMcA)
'The Transporters' DVD, which has been commissioned by Culture Online, part of the Department for Culture, Media and Sport, aims to help children with autism to look at the human face and to learn about emotions.
The DVD was created from research conducted by the Autism Research Centre at Cambridge University. Children with autism tend to avoid looking at human faces and find it hard to understand why facial features move in the way that they do.
Research by Dr Ofer Golan and Professor Simon Baron-Cohen found that following a four-week period of watching the DVD for 15 minutes a day, children with high-functioning autism caught up with typically developing children of the same age in their performance on emotion recognition tasks.
Children with autism are often fascinated by rotating wheels, spinning tops, rotating fans and mechanical, lawful motion, preferring predictable patterns. The toy vehicles featured in The Transporters run on tracks or lines and display 15 emotions, including happy, sad, angry, afraid, excited, unfriendly, kind, sorry, proud, jealous, and joking.
The DVD, which is aimed at 2 to 8-year-olds and narrated by Stephen Fry, also includes an associated interactive quiz to help the child learn about the featured emotion.
One parent who participated in the clinical trials said that there had been a change in the behaviour, speech and range of emotional expressions in their autistic son since he began watching the DVD. They said: "It's a bit like someone's flicked a switch in his head."
30,000 DVDs will be supplied to families with autistic children and copies can be requested from the web-site at: www.transporters.tv
(KMcA)
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