Blended Learning Through an Interactive Mobile Application for Teaching Autistic Kindergarten Students

The mobile applications industry has had significant growth in the last few years. Mobile phones are everywhere since we use them in every part of our daily lives for entertainment, communication and other various uses. Unfortunately, there was also a substantial increase the number of autism cases in kids around the world, which has prompted for a dire need of a therapy method that is cheap, reliable and accessible for everyone who needs it. Researchers have tried several methods, like robotics and virtual reality, to help in the therapy of autistic children. While their results were promising, these technologies are still out of reach of most users due to their high cost. Mobile phones, however, are much more accessible since everyone has one, and they have a wide array of useful gadgets that can be used in making the therapy sessions more engaging and fun such as cameras, accelerometers, speakers, microphones and others. This project aims to design and implement an interactive learning environment based on a mobile application for teaching kids with special needs. 


Introduction
Mobile applications as an industry have exploded in popularity in the last decade. As mobile phones continued to improve in terms of performance as well as price, so did their adoption among the average user (AbdulMalik & . The ever-increasing userbase and ever-expanding tools for application development were a great incentive for programmers to develop software for mobile phones. Because of mobile phones' ease of use and accessibility, the general public have come to rely on their phones for a lot of tasks, including communication, banking, and entertainment among other tasks (Abusham & Zaabi, 2021;Al-Balushi et al., 2018). This cycle of growth in terms of userbase and application development allowed the mobile application industry to balloon into the behemoth that it is today. According to "Statista", the mobile applications industry has accumulated 693 billion dollars in revenue in 2021, with estimated values of 809 and 935 billion dollars in revenue for the years 2022 and 2023 respectively (Statista, 2018). This can be seen in Figure 1. "Statista", 270 million people in the USA alone have smartphones, which is 82.3% of the entire population. Other countries like China and India have 912 million and 439 million smartphone users respectively (Statista, 2021). This can be seen in Figure 2. These results show that the mobile phone platform is very accessible and the perfect target for educational app development. Mobile phones have a large array of equipment for use in applications, such as cameras (for augmented reality), microphones, responsive touchscreens, IR blasters, gyroscopes, accelerometers, and many others that can all be used to make the applications more interactive and engaging. With this in mind, an application can be built to teach autistic children virtually anything, such as teaching them how to walk, read, pray, socialize with people and understand speech in multiple languages through the use of images, sound videos and a multitude of input methods Yousif et al., 2018). The use of mobile applications in research is not a new idea; many researchers have used mobile applications in many fields, including construction, design and education. Autism is a neurological disorder that typically develops when a person is born, or at a very young age (Yousif et al., 2019). People with autism's main characteristics lie on a spectrum and vary in severity, but usually, they include difficulty when socializing, communicating, speaking, forming relationships and doing repetitive tasks. While many parts of the brain are usually affected by autism, the cerebellum is usually the one that is always abnormal in people applications are perfect for helping children with autism, because they can be catered specifically to their needs and they have a range of tools to help increase engagement and accessibility. Mobile phones' built-in equipment can also allow for the monitoring of the children with autism so that a retrospective report can be built for each child without them feeling like they are being intruded upon. This can allow the researchers to follow the child's improvement both in terms of emotional and academic performance without causing any distress for the child. The aim of this paper is to develop a comprehensive and informative mobile application to educate autistic children and help them to respond better to commands. It will cover a wide variety of topics, including learning Quran, sport activities, parts of the body, numbers, letters and colors.

Research Methodology
This paper deploys an experimental method in developing an interactive mobile application to teach children with autism. The project focuses on a more hands on approach to teaching like games and learning by example because children are usually much more engaged during the lessons when they are playing and having fun. Features like video, audio and touch interaction were incorporated to help keep the student's attention. Other features could be incorporated like the gyroscope and accelerometer in a future version of the app for even more intractability. The interactive learning environment's framework is built upon three important pieces, which can be seen in Figure 3, that work together to provide an adequate learning experience. Firstly, a literature survey was performed to have a basic idea of all of the methods that are successful with teaching autistic children and to improve on any weaker aspects of the medium. Then, a mobile application has been written in the Kotlin language with a backend that is easily customizable and upgradable to house the learning materials. Finally, a few subjects were studied to create the learning materials that will then be implemented in the mobile application. A mobile application was chosen because mobile phones are very popular with children, and the application can quickly be customized to the student's need due to its high flexibility and access to a large array of input methods. The data that was collected during the experiments was qualitative and the quantitative aspect was ignored. This is because the interaction with the participants was very brief (over a short period of time) and the quantitative data that was gathered was not accurate enough and was not a good representation of over time improvement. The characteristics that were most focused upon during the experiment were the students' engagement, happiness and information retention.

Implementation
To build a mobile application, a suitable programming language as well as a reliable IDE (integrated development environment) needs to be chosen. For the paper's use case, Kotlin was chosen as the programming language because it is backwards compatible with most Java libraries and requires less code to achieve the same purpose. As for the IDE, android studio was chosen because it has great support for Kotlin and it is the gold standard for android development. It also allows for quick previews of the application and has great support for multilingual applications.
A database is also required for storing all of the data of the students, so Wampserver 64 was used. The application is made up of several different components that all work together to provide the user with a suitable learning experience.
The entire program was built with two languages in mind, English and Arabic, so that both local people as well as international students can use it (Yousif, 2013). The first screen that the user is presented with is the login screen, which can help the user get access to their information and appropriate functions, depending on whether they are a user, an admin or a guest. If the user does not currently have an account, they can make one in the registration page by inputting in their email, name, phone number and preferred password. This can be seen in Figure 4.
The second screen contains all of the functions that are available to each type of user. If they are a user, they are taken to another screen that provides them with three choices; Entertainment, Learning and Testing . The entertainment section allows the user to play simple games that also have an educative value to them. The learning section gives the user access to all of the available learning material, which have a wide variety, including academic topics like fruits, numbers, alphabet, and religious topics like learning to pray and reading the Quran. The final section, the testing section, gives the user a range of quizzes to take so that they can test the new knowledge that they learnt in the reading section. They also have access to their scores from tests they have previously taken so they can gauge how well they did and find out which subjects they are weak in. All of this can be seen in Figure 5.
If they are an admin, however, they have access to other functions like viewing all student scores, being able to alter and/ or remove information and have useful data like averages and standard deviations calculated when needed.
The final type of user is guest, which only has access to a basic description of the application, a list of the available learning material as well as the contact info of the programmers and none of the functions that are available to the user and the admin. All of this can be seen in the case diagram of the application system in Figure 6.    Figure 10 demonstrates all of the colour and alphabets related activities. The students are taught all of the alphabets as well as corresponding words that start with them. They are also taught the names of different colours as well. The application, however, is not limited to these learning activities and can be expanded and catered to the student's needs.

Results
All of the participants that took part in this experiment were from the Oman Science Festival On that took place on the 8th of November 2019, in Muscat. They were all aged 4 -6, with an average age of 5, and there were 50 total participants. There were also 3 times more males than there were females. All of the children consented to take part in this survey and their legal guardians/ parents were informed of the experiments that will take place, all of whom agreed with the terms. Throughout the entire experiment, the children were very immersed in the mobile application.
We asked their legal guardians/parents if they noticed any differences in their behaviour, and we were told that there was a substantial shift in emotional and social engagement compared to when they were at home or at a treatment clinic. Out of the 50 children, 40 of them were very happy during the experiments, 5 of them hated the experiment and 5 of them showed no changes in attitude throughout. The children were also interested in a greater variety of topics and were learning them at much faster rates than usual because a mobile application makes the learning aspect more fun and interesting. By the end, the mobile application had a significant positive impact on the students mental, social and emotional abilities (Yousif, 2015). They were also much more talkative and were more willing to open up with their peers as well as other people around them.   This paper aims to tackle this issue using a mobile application that was designed to help educate and teach autistic children. Our results were very promising; the children were incredibly immersed during the activities and were much more playful and talkative when interacting with their peers and the adults. This is because the mobile application was very simple, so it didn't overload their senses and the learning material had videos, audio and lots of input methods so the students continued to be engaged. The children were also more interested in a greater variety of subjects.
Compared to other papers that used other methods such as virtual/ augmented reality and robotics (Yousif, M., 2021; Yousif, J., 2020; Yousif, M., 2021), the improvements were comparable and the method used to achieve them (mobile application) is much cheaper and much more accessible to most people.