Building an Intelligent, Authorable Serious Game for Autistic Children and Their Carers

This paper introduces the SHARE-IT project, which leverages serious games paradigm to motivate and engage children with autism diagnosis in interactive activities, based on the state-of-the-art autism intervention practices. The aim of SHARE-IT is to formulate, in partnership with schools, parents and industry, the requirements for a robust, intelligent and authorable environment for supporting children in exploring, practicing and acquiring social interaction skills. SHARE-IT focuses on two key challenges: (i) developing robust system architecture and implementation, able to support both continuing development of a serious game for children with autism and its real world use; and (ii) selecting appropriate technologies and techniques to allow for (a) multi-device and operating system deployment, (b) the development of an intelligent serious game for supporting social interaction while (c) allowing the flexibility for the environment to be authored by lay persons. SHARE-IT's architecture is presented and several considerations of importance to enabling the engineering of an intelligent and authorable serious game are discussed. Examples of technologies developed to date are given throughout and a discussion of future challenges offered.