Benefits of Combining Multitouch Tabletops and Turn-Based Collaborative Learning Activities for People with Cognitive Disabilities and People with ASD

Abstract

Learning technologies offer new opportunities to people with disabilities to develop their autonomy and independence. This paper shows how multitouch tabletops support collaborative learning activities for people with cognitive disabilities and people with ASD. We report two educational experiences that have been set up in different contexts. The first one involved 52 students with cognitive disabilities learning musical instruments collaboratively. In the second one, 8 students with ASD worked in pairs focusing on activities related to theory of mind and daily life situations. The main finding is that the students' awareness of other students' actions is increased when they were performing the activities by turns in both experiences. This gives another perspective on the use of these devices as learning tools which have been mainly devised for simultaneous interactions.