Authors : Afiza Ismail, Nazlia Omar and Abdullah Mohd Zin
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.
Afiza Ismail, Nazlia Omar and Abdullah Mohd Zin, 2012. Design and Implementation of Blocks-Based Educational Courseware for Children with Learning Disabilities. Asian Journal of Information Technology, 11: 14-21.