Verity Ward

Despite increasing adoption of neurodiversity-informed approaches, the views and capabilities of autistic children and young people are often downplayed in both educational research and practice. Consequently, this study focused on the experiences of autistic and other neurodivergent young people engaging in collaborative research and design within the context of a weekly coding club. Within the coding club, students contributed to the co-design of a computer game, while creating digital stories about their experiences. Digital stories are short videos about students’ educational experiences, that focus on students’ agency and strengths. The two videos presented here offer insights into both the output of collaborative design work and the process of doing it. The first video shows footage of gameplay from the co-designed game, while the second video is an example a digital story, created by two of the students involved in the study. Together, the two videos show the students’ agency and the fun they experienced, serving as examples of what is possible when autistic and other neurodivergent students are given the space to choose how they use their strengths to engage with learning activities centred around technology-focused co-production.

Aims:‘I am…’ Digital Stories are short videos designed to provide a holistic, strengths-based representation of the child through enabling them to contribute their perspectives to transition planning. Digital Stories have potential during periods in which professionals are unable to physically visit settings or spend time getting to know a child. This paper describes the use of Digital Stories in two contexts: (1) being shown at the beginning of person-centred planning meetings focusing on the transition to primary school; and (2) as a tool to support educational psychologists conducting Education, Health, and Care Needs Assessments for preschool children during Covid-19.

Method:Data was collected via seven semi-structured interviews, 15 feedback forms, and videos of four meetings. Participants comprised six parents/carers, five nursery practitioners, three school staff members, and six educational psychologists. Thematic analysis resulted in five main themes: thinking differently; a wider conversation; more than words; seeing what they see; and potential barriers to making Digital Stories.

Limitations:Children were not able to make their own Digital Stories, which could have influenced their representation within the videos, transition meetings and assessments. However, children’s body worn camera footage was included, enabling a perspective on their interactions and preferences that was closer to the child’s worldview than other observational methods.

Conclusions:Digital Stories have a variety of benefits to practice, including being useful to educational psychologists during assessments, and have the potential to facilitate successful transitions from nursery to primary school.

Participatory design aims to work with those who are often excluded from design processes so that their interests are better represented in design solutions. Autistic children are often marginalised and excluded from design processes due to concerns about how their social and communication differences may act as barriers to participation, leading to calls for design processes to be more inclusive and examined more closely to understand the value of participation for (autistic) children and young people. This research describes a participatory design project to develop a computer game during a weekly coding club at a special school. Fourteen autistic (neurodivergent) young people, eight staff members, four technology industry representatives and a Doctoral researcher worked together to design, develop, test, and evaluate the game. This article focuses specifically on the views and experiences of two of the students, which are captured primarily through a Digital Story. Digital Stories are short student-centred videos which show educational experiences. We use a social semiotic multimodal approach to analysis which does not prioritise linguistically encoded meaning, instead recognising the importance and validity of the many and varied ways in which students contributed to the project. The findings highlight the valuable opportunities that participatory design processes can provide for students as both learners and as expert knowers. It emphasises the need to allow room for students’ agency in the design process, so that they really canhave a sayin the outcomes of design and feel ownership over the process and outcomes of their research participation.