Abstract:

Currently, technological tools have a wide application in various fields of knowledge. In the educational field, technology can be used to create personalized plans for students in the classroom. In recent years, virtual reality (VR) and robotics have been widely used in school environments. The main reason is the ability to generate safe and easy-to-understand environments for students. These characteristics make them especially interesting for students with autism spectrum disorder. Therefore, the aim of the research is to analyze the improvements in imitation due to the application of virtual reality and robotics. Imitation means the ability to repeat the movements performed by the robot in the real environment or in VR. For this purpose, 11 sessions with VR and 11 with robotics (NAO robot) were developed with 8 autistic children throughout the months of February to June 2023. A pretest-posttest design was applied with the Denver questionnaire. The results showed that none of the subjects presented improvements with respect to the pretest after using VR, while with robotics, S1 and S6 showed improvements of 7% and 5.8% respectively in the mean score. In reference to the items, item 5 with 3.8% and item 7 with 10% have suffered improvements in the mean score in the use of robotics versus VR and pretest. As future lines of work, it is proposed to add activities related to contexts outside the school. Also, the possibility of using artificial intelligence as a tool to customize activities in real time by the teacher.

Acknowledgement:
This article was supported by the Programa Estatal de I+D+i Orientado a los Retos de la Sociedad del Ministerio de Ciencia e Innovación Español. PID2020-112611RB-I00/AEI/10.13039/501100011033 and the Agencia Estatal de la Investigación.

Keywords:

Technology, education, autism, virtual reality, robotics.