With my IRB Application now submitted, which took much time to wrap up this week, and having had put together my Interim Report, CYO Airport Story is now feeling quite focused, design-wise. I still have not been able to put a lot of time into the direct production of the project, especially with there having been larger assignments in my Autism Across the Lifespan course that have served as a direct connection to this overall research. I am beginning to understand the importance that design, reading, writing, and conversation have on research, as a whole, along with production. Though it is still difficult to not feel like nothing is getting done if it isn’t direct production.

There had been some debate, between my advisor and I, on how to address the game-like aspects of this project in a way that can provide both customization options and motivation. We had discussed using AI to generate a more customized environment based on the user. While this sounded pretty exciting, my research I feel has confirmed that it is better to generate a more standard environment and to instead provide tools that users can use to modify their experience of that environment themselves. While this may sound quite simple, settling on this approach has solved some of the more major design topics of this project. This approach is also very well-suited to a game environment.

I did, however, use AI to create a custom Chat Bot that can give a customized Social Story based on a prompt given by a user. It took quite a bit of trial and error to get it to produce a story that was in keeping with the traditional Social Story. I also wanted it to be adaptable to specific concerns or anxieties given by individual users. I plan to continue to work with this Chat Bot in order to make the given stories adaptable to various ages as well.