Citation in Cleveland's Plain Dealer on Autism

Monarch Teaching Technologies in Shaker Heights makes software for autistic children
Tuesday, December 02, 2008

Chris Seper
Plain Dealer Reporter

Need help teaching an autistic child struggling to understand emotions like excited and scared? There's a game for that -- and one that will put that child's face, voice and favorite colors into the game.

A customizable online autism library with tools like the emotion game is one of the key offerings in Vizzle, newly released Web-based software by Monarch Teaching Technologies in Shaker Heights.

Vizzle (short for "visual learning") builds customized, autism-specific flash cards, games and other interactive exercises for children. All these personalized materials can be placed online for other Vizzle users to borrow and adapt.

It's among a series of products capitalizing on the need for autism education. Google, for example, continues to adapt one of its free programs to help autism educators, and startups from Shaker Heights to Seattle now promise to cut the cost of teaching an autistic child.

"The key objective of our work is to bring a marriage of what's effective in treating autism with what's practical," said Terry Murphy, Monarch's chief executive.

Autism diagnoses have nearly doubled in the last 10 years. About six of every 1,000 children are now diagnosed with some form of autism, according to statistics from the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention.

There are about 300,000 students with autism in public schools, according to the U.S. Department of Education's Office of Special Education.

Treatment is expensive both for parents and schools. Rural areas rarely have enough autism resources, said Dr. James Ball, co-chairman of the Autism Society of America's panel of professional advisers. Complete treatment, which includes one-on-one therapy, can cost up to $65,000 a year, said Dr. Nabil El-Ghoroury, a pediatric psychologist at MetroHealth Medical Center who has studied autism for the last 17 years.

Vizzle tries to cut education costs while infusing the latest research. Its premise is that children with autism learn more through visual experiences. The software guides users to make books, flash cards and games that can include a series of images, sounds and videos.

One book already in the online database explains how to act when going to McDonald's on Tuesdays, and a matching game there teaches colors in English and Spanish. Another lesson explains that you read first and then get a cookie: A book slowly disappears to reveal the chocolate-chip cookie beneath.

Children with autism struggle with generalizations, said Lauren Stafford, who works at both the Monarch School and Monarch Teaching Technologies. Changing pictures, sounds and other parts of a lesson help teachers to determine whether a child has mastered the concepts of the lesson or grasped the task, she said.

"It allows the teacher to have control over what you want the child to learn," Stafford said.

Both the Monarch School and Monarch Teaching Technologies are owned in part by the nonprofit Bellefaire JCB and operate near one another on Bellefaire's Shaker Heights property. Vizzle is based on work from the Center for Communications Disorders at Children's Hospital Boston. Last month, Monarch received a National Institutes of Health grant to further develop the software.

Vizzle will cost $25 per month for families and $100 per month for clinicians. School districts could pay $940 per year for each teacher using the software, although that price varies based on the number of students.

Despite their lower costs, software companies admit they're struggling to dent the market share held by the service providers that do one-on-one interventions with school districts.

Chris Whalen, president of the Seattle autism software maker TeachTown, said districts rely on the service providers for recommendations on autism education. The providers resist suggesting software that could cut into the lucrative one-on-one approach, Whalen said.

Also, some experts think that most of the software out now is good enough. "For me, personally, there's nothing that's not already out there," said Ball, of the Autism Society of America. "You need to be an investigator and find it."

Yet applying software in autism education continues to flourish, as more researchers agree that children with autism learn better with visuals. Sometimes, the connections are coincidental.

The makers of SketchUp design software were stunned when they received letters about how well it helped autistic children. It started Project Spectrum to promote the software's free version to educators, and Google expanded that project after it purchased SketchUp in 2006 (Google.com/educators/spectrum.html).

"SketchUp is something kids were naturally drawn to. What we didn't understand at the time is that people with autism tend to be visually and spatially gifted," said Tom Wyman, business development manager for SketchUp.

"It's taking what these kids' strengths are and using them. So often, these kids are reminded of their weaknesses."

To reach this Plain Dealer reporter:

cseper@plaind.com, 216-999-4169