ADDITIONAL COMMUNITY WINNERS

LINE UP By cam

Line Up is a fun game for autistic children, that harnesses their interest in lining up toys and other objects, to to teach them facial recognition skills that are essential for communication.

I've been developing the prototype for Line Up over the last four weeks in my Design Studio class at the Maryland Institute College of Art.

In my research, I have found that it is very common for autistic children to line up objects (often very precisely). I have developed a product that aims to harness that behavior to teach better communication skills by improving facial expression recognition.

Line Up Features:

+ A triple reinforcement of facial expression learning. + New game pieces can be downloaded for free from website. + Replaceable game pieces - Use your own photos or symbols for matching. + Game board surface can be written on with a dry erase marker.

With this product, my goal is to increase autistic children's communication abilities and ultimately to ensure better inclusion into society.

Check out more process shots after the jump and check out the project homepage on the Core77 design arena for the full video breakdown!

The Autism Connects technology and design competition challenged students to help individuals with Autism Spectrum Disorder (ASD) to better connect with the world around them and allow individuals who do not have ASD to better understand and connect with those who do by combining technological and creative solutions. This international student competition brought together a distinguished jury panel across disciplines including Yves Behar (fuseproject), Lisa Strausfeld (Pentagram), Richard Seymour (Seymourpowell) and our own Allan Chochinov (Core77). The Jury grand prize winner will be awarded $5000 and the top three designs will receive a $1,000 stipend and registration fees to attend the 2011 International Meeting for Autism Research, to be held May 12 to 14, 2011 in San Diego, CA, where they will be invited to present their design concept. We will be profiling all of the winners in anticipation of next week's conference.

See the full list of winners here.