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Designing an accessible web app to teach piano to students with autism

Published: 23 September 2019 Publication History

Abstract

Guidelines for teaching music to children with autism mainly focus on the environment and activities, often neglecting how to deliver music instructions in an accessible and effective way. Technology-enhanced intervention offers a structured, repeatable, and coherent training environment, which can be modulated according to the student's needs. The Suoniamo app is specifically designed to help students with autism learn to play music in a visually structured way. The app is co-designed with professionals experienced in training people with autism. It provides modules for learning how to read, identify and interpret musical notation (note position and values, pauses, etc.) on a virtual piano keyboard. After this structured training, the child may generalize mastered concepts on a real piano, being able to interpret notes, rhythms, pauses and simple scores in the pentagram.
Preliminary results of a pilot study with three students with autism appear to confirm the validity of the proposed approach.

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  • (2024)EMooly: Supporting Autistic Children in Collaborative Social-Emotional Learning with Caregiver Participation through Interactive AI-infused and AR ActivitiesProceedings of the ACM on Interactive, Mobile, Wearable and Ubiquitous Technologies10.1145/36997388:4(1-36)Online publication date: 21-Nov-2024
  • (2023)Co-design of Technology Involving Autistic Children: A Systematic Literature ReviewInternational Journal of Human–Computer Interaction10.1080/10447318.2023.226624840:22(7498-7516)Online publication date: 12-Oct-2023
  • (2023)Serious Games for Children with Autism Spectrum Disorder: A Systematic Literature ReviewInternational Journal of Human–Computer Interaction10.1080/10447318.2023.219405140:14(3655-3682)Online publication date: 11-Apr-2023
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cover image ACM Other conferences
CHItaly '19: Proceedings of the 13th Biannual Conference of the Italian SIGCHI Chapter: Designing the next interaction
September 2019
197 pages
ISBN:9781450371902
DOI:10.1145/3351995
Permission to make digital or hard copies of all or part of this work for personal or classroom use is granted without fee provided that copies are not made or distributed for profit or commercial advantage and that copies bear this notice and the full citation on the first page. Copyrights for components of this work owned by others than the author(s) must be honored. Abstracting with credit is permitted. To copy otherwise, or republish, to post on servers or to redistribute to lists, requires prior specific permission and/or a fee. Request permissions from [email protected].

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Association for Computing Machinery

New York, NY, United States

Publication History

Published: 23 September 2019

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Author Tags

  1. accessibility
  2. autism
  3. co-design
  4. music
  5. usability
  6. web applications

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CHItaly19

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CHItaly '19 Paper Acceptance Rate 23 of 47 submissions, 49%;
Overall Acceptance Rate 109 of 242 submissions, 45%

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Cited By

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  • (2024)EMooly: Supporting Autistic Children in Collaborative Social-Emotional Learning with Caregiver Participation through Interactive AI-infused and AR ActivitiesProceedings of the ACM on Interactive, Mobile, Wearable and Ubiquitous Technologies10.1145/36997388:4(1-36)Online publication date: 21-Nov-2024
  • (2023)Co-design of Technology Involving Autistic Children: A Systematic Literature ReviewInternational Journal of Human–Computer Interaction10.1080/10447318.2023.226624840:22(7498-7516)Online publication date: 12-Oct-2023
  • (2023)Serious Games for Children with Autism Spectrum Disorder: A Systematic Literature ReviewInternational Journal of Human–Computer Interaction10.1080/10447318.2023.219405140:14(3655-3682)Online publication date: 11-Apr-2023
  • (2023)Music Learning Android App Development for Autistic ChildrenArtificial Intelligence10.1007/978-3-031-22485-0_16(170-179)Online publication date: 1-Jan-2023
  • (2022)How are games for autistic children being evaluated?Proceedings of the 21st Brazilian Symposium on Human Factors in Computing Systems10.1145/3554364.3559127(1-13)Online publication date: 17-Oct-2022
  • (2020)A Web App for Teaching Piano to Students with AutismProceedings of the 2020 International Conference on Advanced Visual Interfaces10.1145/3399715.3399946(1-3)Online publication date: 28-Sep-2020
  • (2020)Accessibility in Pervasive Systems: An Exploratory StudyDistributed, Ambient and Pervasive Interactions10.1007/978-3-030-50344-4_3(25-38)Online publication date: 19-Jul-2020
  • (2019)Which Virtual Piano Keyboard for Children with Autism? A Pilot StudyHCI International 2019 – Late Breaking Papers10.1007/978-3-030-30033-3_22(280-291)Online publication date: 31-Aug-2019

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