Abstract:

“Virtual worlds” is a phrase that can refer to a variety of environments with a different set of technological equipment. In order to clarify the object of the present contribution it is necessary to clarify that the authors will report a pilot study based on the use of 3D virtual worlds built with an open source technology that lets users access and interact in an online environment by using virtual antropomorphic graphical characters (avatars). Specifically the technology used is a Multi-User Virtual Environments (MUVE) characterized by the opportunity to design and create personalized avatars and spaces of interaction. Examples of such environments are Second Life (secondlife.com) and all worlds build with OpenSimulator (opensimulator.org).
MUVEs have been widely investigated in the last decades in the direction of their affordances in the educational area addressing a variety of aspects connected to the teaching/learning process such as the concept of identity and embodiment (Author, 2013, 2016) and the cultural and social aspects (Boellstorff, 2008; Dawley, 2009, Pearce, 2009).

Thanks to the technology flexibility offered to designers and teachers such virtual environments experienced a large and productive use also in the special education field with a rich literature in the area of Autism Spectrum Disorder (ASD) (Didehbani, Allen, Kandalaft, Krawczyk & Chapman, 2016; Parsons, 2015; Ringland, Baldwin, Boyd & Hayes, 2016; Wallace, Parsons & Bailey, 2017).
The present contribution will focus on the design of a social story activity in the virtual world edMondo that has been integrated in a pilot study which involved a child with ASD (high functioning) in an intervention directed to the development of social and mentalizing abilities by using a robotics device (NAO) and a virtual avatar (Authors, 2019; 2020).

References:
[1] Author, 2013; 2016
[2] Authors, 2019; 2020
[3] Boellstorff, T. (2008). Coming of age in Second Life. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press.
[4] Dawley, L. (2009). Social network knowledge construction: emerging virtual world pedagogy. On the horizon, 17(2), 109–121.
[5] Didehbani, N., Allen, T., Kandalaft, M., Krawczyk, D., & Chapman, S. (2016).Virtual reality social cognition training for children with high functioning autism. Computers in Human Behavior, 62, 703–711.
[6] Parsons, S. (2015). Learning to work together: designing a multi-user virtual reality game for social collaboration and perspective-taking for children with autism. International Journal of Child-Computer Interaction, 6 C, 28–38.
[7] Pearce, C. (2009). Communities of play. Emergent cultures, in multiplayer games and virtual worlds. Cambridge, UK: MIT Press
[8] Ringland, K.E., Baldwin, M.S., Boyd, L.E., & Hayes, G. (2016). Would you be mine: Appropriating Minecraft as an assistive technology for youth with autism. ASSETS ‘16 Proceedings of the 18th International ACM SIGACCESS Conference on Computers and Accessibility, 33–41. New York, NY: ACM.
[9] Wallace, S., Parsons, S., & Bailey, A. (2017). Self-reported sense of presence and responses to social stimuli by adolescents with ASD in a collaborative virtual reality environment. Journal of Intellectual and Developmental Disability, 42(2), 131–141.

Keywords:

Virtual world, autism, social stories, social skills.