Aussie Innovation – Whiz Kid Games

by Seana Smith on Monday, August 9th, 2010

Did you hear about Whiz Kid Games when it won The Victorian Premier’s Recognition Award for design achievement a couple of weeks ago?

Whiz Kids Games is a collection of online computer games aimed at children with moderate to severe ASD.  The games, which are colourful and fun in themselves, teach life skills to the kids playing.   The games are a collaboration between multimedia design students from Swinburne’s Faculty of Design, plus autism experts and others.

To get started, the best website is:   www.autismgames.com.au

There parents and teachers can read about the project itself, and find out which skill each game is aiming to teach.

The games themselves can be found at:  www.whizkidsgames.com

The website is still under construction and several of the games have glitches and bugs.  Some can be slow to load as well.   However, Whiz Kid Games is definitely a website to keep an eye on. It’s great to see innovation and ASD expertise combniing, and even better that the games are totally free to use.

You can read an article about Whiz Kid Games from the Sydney Morning Herald at:

http://www.smh.com.au/digital-life/games/blogs/screenplay/whiz-kids-awarded-for-special-games/20100727-10sw8.html#comments

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Update on autism and divorce

by Benison O'Reilly on Thursday, August 5th, 2010

We’re moving to a bigger and better site!

Just not yet.

Seana and I are working on our new standalone blogspot for the AAH.  We’ve got it up and running, but it still needs lots of work.  We’re also planning to move all our old posts over to the new site’s archives, which will take a while, so expect it to be up and running in a couple of weeks.

In the meantime I stumbled across this report of another study on autism and divorce. Back in May I reported on a study that found that the rate of divorce between parents of kids with ASDs did not differ significantly from the divorce rate for parents of typically developing children, exploding that old 80% divorce rate mythology.

This new study,  published in the Journal of Family Psychology, and reported in the LA Times is less encouraging. Researchers investigated 391 families participating in the Adolescents and Adults with Autism study and compared them with other demographically similar families whose children were developing typically. The divorce rate among couples raising a child with an ASD was  nearly twice as high as the  rate for the control families (23.5% vs 14%).

The risk of divorce was higher for families that had one or more older siblings in addition to the child with ASD (which unfortunately exactly describes my situation, although last time I checked my husband and I were still talking!) , although interestingly not for families who had more than one child with an ASD, or a more severely affected child with autism.

This suggests that ASDs may add some additional strain to marriages-an unsurprising finding-but in this study 75% of ASD marriages remained  intact, which suggests the odds are still in our favour.

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