Resources
Downloadable material for use at home. All proceeds go to the charity Autism Centre of Excellence at Cambridge
The Transporters
The Transporters is a fun video series to help autistic children understand the causes of emotions, and the facial expressions that go with them.
How does it work?
Many autistic children love predictability. The Transporters was designed to harness this love of predictability by making all the characters in the episodes vehicles that move in a predictable way, such as trains, trams and cable cars that move along tracks.
What’s novel is that each vehicle has a real human face ‘grafted’ onto it which moves in a life-like way. Whilst each vehicle is an animation, the faces are from actors showing real human emotions.
Even without realising it, when an autistic child is watching the train or the cable car going along tracks, they are getting an opportunity to look at faces, and to learn how different situations give rise to different emotions.
Research shows that even after watching The Transporters for just 15 minutes per day for one month, autistic children improve significantly in their emotion recognition ability.
Mind Reading
Mind Reading is an online course based on the idea that emotional ‘literacy’ can improve just like any other skill, with repetition and practice.
Emotions in the real world are transient, without any opportunity to ‘re-play’ the emotion, to study them, but by making emotions digital they can be played and replayed as often as is needed, either in a private setting or in a group teaching format.
It is an emotional ‘library’ and the video, audio clips and stories are available for anyone who wants to learn to recognise emotions or to use them for teaching and research.
The development and evaluation of Mind Reading was funded by the Shirley Foundation. The course includes 412 different emotions, each shown on 6 actors’ faces (males, females, different ethnicities, different ages) and through 6 actors’ voices, and so comprises a rich collection of almost 5,000 emotions in audio and video. Each emotion is classified according to 6 levels, where Level 1 is for young children and Level 6 is for adults, so that you can progress up the levels to learn emotions you may be less familiar with. And you can learn this at your own speed, in your own time, from the comfort of your own home, online.