Autism iHelp – Shapes 1.3.0

Autism iHelp is a vocabulary teaching aid developed collaboratively by parents of a child with Autism and a speech-language pathologist. The initiative arose from the recognized need for targeted language intervention tools for children on the Autism Spectrum, focusing on their distinctive strengths and challenges with expressive vocabulary.

Among its offerings, Autism iHelp SHAPES stands out as a particularly innovative tool when compared to other early language learning applications. This app organizes images into categories based on specific shapes, helping children with Autism distinguish and identify common items by their shape. Such an approach promotes increased generalization in different environments, allowing children to understand that categorization boundaries can be flexible rather than fixed.

The app features 64 real-world photographs, aligning with research indicating that children with Autism tend to respond more effectively to photographs than to illustrations, given their visual learning preferences.

Additionally, Autism iHelp SHAPES includes two Learning Enhancement activities presented in an engaging, game-like format. These interactive games assess retention of the vocabulary learned and integrate both auditory and visual memory components. Furthermore, caregivers can monitor their child's progress through detailed reports that average the results of the last three performances for each activity.

As articulated by users, “with Autism iHelp…..it gets better.”