The thought of developing games

Working as a Telehealth ABA practitioner I have enjoyed using various animations and creating the kind of resources that could cater my client’s best needs. Even when I worked at clinical and school setting I was fond of crafting and doing DIYs that could engage the students for better learning. The fact that engagement allows the students to not only involve themselves but also to explore more effective approaches to learning There is a sense of achievement when they accomplish a goal after putting in effort that is enjoyable.

Referring to later 4 years of my practice, it was exhausting finding games online that could match the competency and progressing level of my students. As an ABA practitioner, we require skills and performances to be generalized in order to be executed in the real world. Hence, I tried my best from using flashcards, to activities and of course online games!

I observed that while playing games online children had an intrinsic motivation to take my session. They were eager to learn and were not sitting and responding for ‘the sake of responding’.. and I LOVED THAT! I am no software developer but I wanted such skill-building games of my own. Something that is more specific to their needs, something more specific to their choice of learning and something even more specific to the way of our teaching!

The idea to create games was definitely not different but unique in its own way. In Applied Behavior Analysis (ABA) we do not and CANNOT work without quantitative (or even qualitative) data. It starts from intakes to conducting assessments where we track the baselines (i.e., the current level of skills and behaviors) with the interventions (i.e., after implementing therapeutic strategies). The idea was to incorporate ABA principals in games. The students can explore and track their own progress.

In this era of learning we cannot negate the use of screens 100%. So why not utilizing it functionally or for learning? Looking at a broader spectrum of exploring potentials, this initiative will enable students to acquire and enhance new skills while fostering an engaging enjoyable learning experience.

The games are just not developed in a day. I have propelled my work through my experience and invested a lot of time reading about ABA and ethics in developing novel resources. I prepared a whole document before it was implemented by thedeveloper on the software. We ran bug trials one after the other to remove any glitches to ensure smooth operations. Within few months of back-to-back work we were ready to display our work to all of you.