Teaching Children with Autism to Play a Video Game Using Activity Schedules and Game-Embedded Simultaneous Video Modeling

Children with autism have severe and pervasive impairments in social interactions and communication that impact most areas of daily living and often limit independent engagement in leisure activities. We taught four children with autism to engage in an age-appropriate leisure skill, playing the video game Guitar Hero II™, through the use of (a) an activity schedule to set up, turn on, and turn off the game and system, (b) simultaneous video modeling embedded in the game to teach manipulation of the Guitar Hero II™ controller to play the game, and (c) the training of multiple exemplars of songs to develop a generalized repertoire of playing Guitar Hero II™. A multiple-probe design across participants was used to evaluate the effectiveness of the training package. All of the participants successfully learned to play Guitar Hero II™ and playing skills generalized to a song and a setting not used during training.