Abstract: Customized education is now being seriously considered for children with learning disability such
as autism who have serious impairments with social, emotional and communication skills. One of the
approaches for providing this type of education is by using highly personalized educational courseware. The
aim of this study is to describe the design and implementation of blocks for developing educational courseware
for autistic children with learning disability. The availability of these blocks enables end-users (such as parents
or teachers) to build personalized educational courseware within the block-based software development
environment. The process of designing and implementing programming blocks involves four main activities:
blocks identification process, blocks design, blocks implementation and evaluation. In order to prepare the
autistic child to learn to read, four blocks that are required in the pre-reading stage: apart from these three
blocks, there are three types of blocks that need to be provided so that application programs can be properly
developed. The suitability of the blocks have been shown by using simple case studies. |