My Autism Insights

This morning, Gus - the second grader - woke up with a question on his mind: How many zeros in a billion?  How the heck was I supposed to know?  So we tried an experiment.  I had made the suggestion to his teacher that he might be able to focus a little better during independent work if he had a laptop to work on, and I said I’d try letting him do some work on his own at home.  This morning seemed to be as good a time as any.  So we logged on to the Internet, I wrote down the question for him and told him how to do a web search.  Our Kidzui search was fruitless, so I told him he could use the grownup Internet.  Very exciting.

Sure enough, we found a site with the answers - more answers than we could have possibly even thought to ask for.  It was like Christmas morning.  We talked about why anyone would need to use such big numbers, and even a little about how scientists  don’t bother writing all those zeros, but use a special way of writing how many there are (because you’re never too young to know about scientific notation).  And that’s not even the most interesting thing to me, that my second grader now knows how many zeros there are in a quintillion.

At school, his behavior was different.  He wasn’t bouncing off the walls, but instead was just zoning out in his own little world.  It was such a pronounced difference that his teacher wrote me a long note about it.  She seemed perplexed.

But I have a pretty good idea what he was thinking about.  I’d be my last dollar that he was envisioning all those zeros in a centillion.  Wouldn’t you?

The other day I posted about the ZACbrowser after I had tested it out and mentioned that my kids had enjoyed another ‘kid browser’ called Kidzui.  My reasoning for not sticking with Kidzui was that there was a monthly fee, which, although not high, I was unable to afford at the time.  Well, I just received an email that Kidzui is now being offered for free!  My kids will be thrilled!  The basic version (they’ve introduced a paid members version) doesn’t have some bells and whistles, but as far as the browsing part is concerned, everything is there.

Zacbrowser was designed with autistic kids in mind to remove some of the more distracting elements, ads and visual ‘noise’ from the screen.  I found it to be a pleasant experience and Gus would certainly enjoy it, but I think it may be more appropriate for kids who are younger and perhaps less computer savvy. 

The feature of creating a Kidzui icon is lots of fun for them as well, but I admit, my daughter is much more interested in constantly changing her character’s clothes than Gus is.  But he did enjoy it at least initially.

Gus likes being able to navigate to different pages within one site and Kidzui still allows that freedom without the content that I’d want to keep him away from.  It also has a bit more in the way of actual browsing for content and images.  Sometimes Gus needs to gather information, not just to play games.  And I periodically get reports of what exactly they’re pulling up, so I don’t need to micromanage them at the computer, which is kind of the point.  When Gus is old enough, he may even enjoy some online correspondence within the Kidzui community. (I’m not going to encourage this any time soon - one more computer addict in the house is not the goal here.)

ZACbrowser is very new and I fully expect it to grow, so I’m not writing it off.  But for the moment, now that we can afford it, Kidzui is back on our desktop.

I learned from a couple of sources that there is a new browser created especially for autistic children called ZAC - Zone for Autistic Children. I downloaded and tested the available beta version and also let my five year old at it. Gus was at school, but they have similar abilities and interests when it comes to the computer, so she’s a good enough stand in for him. We’ve tried a similar product, Kidzui , which they enjoyed a great deal, but there’s a monthly fee for it, which I can’t really spare at the moment. Right now, ZACbrowser is free, so there was nothing to lose by trying.

Visually, the site is great: no ads, nice big universally understandable icons. My daughter isn’t quite reading yet, but she was able to identify the television, games, music and story icons. She wanted to start with the stories, which brings me to the biggest difficulty we had with the browser. The load times were very slow. Initially, I thought it was my computer, but I also downloaded the browser to my laptop and it was about as slow there too. For a child who has a short attention span or trouble waiting, this could be frustrating. It could also be due to a huge amount of traffic because of the newness of the site, so this may just be a temporary issue.

Once she picked a story, we got no audio - it would only be appropriate for a child who can read. Other stories were fine. The buttons to switch to other pages (i.e. on Disney and Noggin sites, you can click to see other games and stories featuring different characters) and that upset her. Since my kids are pretty adept at navigating through the different sites, they are used to being able to experience all the characters, not just one. The irony is that having them unable to do things like print or click on buttons that would lead to ads is really a great idea. I don’t know how many times they’ve clicked on a button by accident, navigated away from the desired page and yelled, “We internetted!!” That’s their word for having a computer problem. It’s actually extended to life away from the PC. TV goes out, it internetted.

It would be great if there were a happy medium between disabling the really problematic things while allowing a bit more flexibility.

I was unable to check out the television feature because it was taking so long to load, I actually got annoyed.

Another feature I missed was the ability to web-surf. With Kidzui, my son could go look up things about the planets if he got tired of playing games or he was able to use it when he had a report due for school (yes, at seven, but I won’t even get into that). He’s autistic, but still quite adept at using a computer. So having that ability in ZACbrowser would be nice for older autistic students.

Overall, this is a new product, so I expect that it will be refined many times over. So far, while not perfect, I think it’s mostly a wonderful idea. I’ll be keeping an eye on it. I recommend that you do the same!