We are on a mission to make the best learning platform for the individuals with autism. We are taking decades of our team's expertise and passion, empirical research, and the feedback of the autism community to build life changing tools.
Here are 10 core values we are using to build our products. We will be going into more detail about these in future posts, and look forward to your feedback as we move forward.
1) Customizable: The spectrum of autism is incredibly wide, and we know that students are more engaged when lessons meet their interests and comprehension. We are building a platform that can be individualized easily and quickly.
2) Data: In order to ensure student success and problem solve learning issues, we must be able to collect and analyze data on student performance. This can often be a tedious process, and we are striving to make data collection simple and meaningful.
3) Clear end points: Many individuals with (and without!) autism become anxious when the end of an activity if not clearly defined. Our lessons will always incorporate a visual system to indicate when they are finished.
4) Generalization: Even though research is supporting technology as a useful tool for autism intervention, our students face the serious risk of skills getting stuck on the iPad because they may have difficulty generalizing. Along with our digital solutions we are developing offline curriculum that can take mastered skills on the Ipad into the real world.
5) Flexibility: Many students with autism are great at memorizing. To avoid rote learning, we are creating learning routines that incorporate flexibility so that students learn skills – rather than activities.
6) Adaptive Learning: Success is one of the most important factors in student learning. Adjusting lesson difficulty (making lessons easier when students struggle and more difficult as they succeed) is crucial to ensure students are always engaged and learning good routines.
7) Constructive reinforcement: We believe that by using high interest themes that lessons can be inherently motivating for students. We also believe that hard work deserves reward, and that activities should include meaningful positive reinforcement.
8) Errorless Learning and Independence: Students with autism are generally good at learning routines, even if those routines contain the “wrong” way of doing things. We are building activities to teach skills correctly without allowing errors, then fading prompts to ensure each skill reaches independence.
9) Learning Standards: Our lessons teach meaningful skills and are aligned with national learning standards.
10) Social and Communication Skills: Finding ways to target the core deficits of autism – social and communication skills – is at the core of our mission. We believe in using mastered skills to help individuals build meaningful social relationships and communicate effectively.