Understanding Minds and Changing Mindsets

When we started three years back, we had no idea that we would be hitting a series of ideas and projects that eventually would change the world (in some senses). I have never got a chance or thought of looking back into what’s been achieved, and hence this blog to share some of our learnings, activities and ideas for the future. Personally it’s been a great humbling experience, and a learning opportunity I wouldn't have ever imagined – I probably gained more than what did.

It all started with a group of committed volunteers

A group of volunteers from SAP Labs, Bangalore got together to experiment the efficacy of iPads for teaching children in the Autism Spectrum. We worked with Kavita Sharma and team from Autism Society of India (ASI) for almost a month to understand what’s Autism, the challenges associated and what exactly would we like to teach the children. Soon we arrived at the ‘package’ – Communication, Cognition and fun with learning.

Here's a glimpse from the second workshop that we had conducted in April 2011. It’s been used a lot of times, and I personally like it because it shows a child engaged independently in the learning process

A series of workshops made it very clear that the applications and their use on iPads were really effective in achieving the cognition and communication goals of children in the autism spectrum. This can be mainly attributed to one of the primary strengths that most of the children in the spectrum possess – The ability to learn in pictures.

iPads or for that matter any touch screen device provide visual interactive learning, on a single surface and of course instant response whether the child is on the right track or not. This continually provides much needed positive (or negative) reinforcement to children, which is essential for the learning process. We saw that this provided a much needed methodology that makes interactive and independent learning possible for the children. Here’s one of the early feedbacks that we received, and I can relate to this based on hundreds of interactions that I’ve had with parents in the past years –

“The beauty of helping children with autism is, it is not just that one individual you help, you touch the lives of the child's parents, grandparents, extended family, and the community, who are all rooting for their child!” – A parent

This was just a spark to the project, that today is a landmark policy for any corporate across the world. Our efforts continued, and I can keep writing about this, more than anyone would like to read. Here are some of the achievements and learnings over the years made possible by a really committed team from Autism Society and SAP.

Project Prayas is born

Based on the experience that we gathered through the workshops, SAP, Spastics Society of Karnataka and ASI decided to open up Prayas Lab – a center dedicated towards providing technology based learning intervention for children in the Autism Spectrum. The project since then has gained a good level of maturity and understanding of the training needs for children with Autism. Today, we have 4 centers running the Prayas program in Bangalore and Coimbatore. Multiple innovations have been made in the training and evaluation process, some of which I shall describe below.

 

Inaugural day - The children here are being felicitated for their contribution to the Prayas logo. The Prayas Lab logo is a compilation of 3 different inputs received from children across India.

It’s not just about the iPad – ‘Bol’

Soon we realized that the applications that were being used for learning were good, but could be more effective. The only major challenge being that the content was not suitable enough for the children in India – the content in these applications were (and still are) west oriented, and the children could not completely relate to the content all the time. Based on some amount of research and discussions ‘Bol’ was created. This iPad app is available on the iTunes app store free of cost. The main aim of the app is to teach and aid in communication. The ‘template’ app gives the freedom to the teachers as well as educators to build customized visual content with background voice in their native language. The app has since then been recognized in multiple forums, and will be soon available on IOS 7 and android. The second app “iKatha”, focuses on story based learning, and is available on the iTunes store since Jan 2014.

Volunteers have been the backbone of the project - The team from SAP that built ‘Bol’

Opening up the content to the world – www.learn4autism.com

While the Prayas ‘method’ was gaining acceptance, there was a lot more to be done for building content that could be used with children of different age groups and learning levels. On one side we were limited by our own capacities, and also wanted that the content that we create reaches a wider audience – much beyond the children who attend the Prayas program. This is where ASI and volunteers from SAP came together to create the first of its kind open source content repository (www.learn4autism.com) where lessons are specially designed for children in the Autism Spectrum and of course available free of cost. Today, there are over 800 users actively using the content on the portal. One of the areas where we keenly need community support is here -  in managing, editing and building content.

Making Autism Work with SAP Autism at Work

One of the key pillars of our work (at SAP) in the space has been that of leveraging the skills of those in the autism spectrum at workplace. Our friends in the Test center at SAP Labs, Bangalore were the first to pilot the initiative. We started the process of recruitment and sensitization of the teams with help of ASI, and of course it’s been an amazing journey thereafter. More about the efforts here in Ferose’speech at Davos 2013. Kudos to the mentors, managers and the leadership for making this a success. The rest of course is history, when SAP made a global announcement of adopting the program at a global level and have 1% of our employees from the Autism Spectrum by 2020. The progress since then has been encouraging, and today we have colleagues in the Autism Spectrum in India, Germany, Ireland, Canada and US.

 Looking forward: A lot more to be changed and done

What’s been done till now is not even the tip of the iceberg, in fact there’s a lot more to be done. Couple of areas where we see a whitespace, especially in India, is skill based training for those in the spectrum.

Think outside the box – One good part about our efforts from the beginning has been that we never knew why something wouldn't work. Of course, now we have a good amount of anecdote-based evidence to show that what we did worked. At each stage our approach was to think beyond the problem, towards the solution – ‘Bol’, learn4autism or a lot of other ideas came through issues that we faced at each stage.

Technology can provide lots of answers – The field constantly faces shortage of trained educators and learning resources. The only way to sort this out in a fast, scalable way is through investment in technology. We need to spend time with the children, educators and the community to understand their needs and come up with innovative and cost effective solutions. One of the principles that we have at Prayas is to build technology, content and platforms that are open & free and to make the services associated at a cost, which go on to sustain the project in the longer term.

Work towards skills development - Most of the learning today ends at the age of 14-15 years, and educators or practitioners don't have an answer to ‘what next’ beyond this. The autism community, along with corporates and local business, have to work closely in understanding their needs, and leveraging the skills of those in the spectrum for productive work. Corporates of course have to move beyond their CSR mindsets towards using such ‘talent from the fringes’ in driving innovation and productivity.

It is not very often that you get an opportunity to combine your profession with passion that creates a large scale impact for the society and your company. It’s been a fulfilling journey, with tremendous commitment from the SAP volunteers, and the company. Look forward to the continued support and ideas from the community in providing a solution towards education and skill based training for those in the autism spectrum.