ZooU

This interactive software program is designed to enhance elementary students' social literacy as well as track their progress toward specific social goals. Meeting these goals helps children more easily establish and maintain positive peer relations, which research has shown is closely tied to academic success. Failure to develop such relationships can lead to academic, behavioral, and emotional problems.

ZooU focuses on six core social skills: impulse control, empathy, initiation of play, communication, cooperation, and emotion regulation. The program's ability to assess students' initial social skill level as well as their progress allows educators to both implement the intervention and measure its impact.

HippoCampus

HippoCampus is a computer-based interactive social tutoring system designed to help children with high-functioning autism spectrum disorder achieve greater social understanding and to track progress toward mastering specific social skills.

HippoCampus focuses on several core social skills: verbal communication, nonverbal communication, perspective taking, initiation, impulse control, and emotion regulation. These interactions are tracked by the HippoCampus software, enabling teachers to generate reports on individual students' overall social skills level as well as learning trends for specific social skills across all students.

HippoCampus has been found to improve students' motivation and ability to interact with others socially and to lessen their desire for disengagement from peers.

Stories in Motion (in development)

Stories in Motion takes traditional storytelling and transforms it into a fully interactive computer-based social intervention designed to help elementary students with high-functioning autism spectrum disorders. These students face unique challenges with social skills, and their ability to master such skills can have long-reaching effects on their ability to learn.

The technology employed by the program actively engages students and is easy for educators to use. In addition, the program's web-based professional tools enhance educators' ability to effectively implement the intervention. The intervention will include 12 social stories, each designed to address one specific area of social difficulty (e.g., joining a group of peers).