iAutism

Natural Learning Concepts is a company well known for its wide range of educational material for people with autism and other special needs and for their parents and therapists. From books on autism for adults to cards and books or DVDs of social stories for children, through sensory stimulating toys for the child or special shoe laces, the offer covers many types of needs and is well worth a visit to its website.

The company also has had for a while NL Autism Concepts: Sort & Categorize, a simple and free app that allows to exercise the categorization of images.

16 categories

The functionality offered by the application is really simple. After two initial screens, the activity appears. It has a single mode of operation: at the top of the display there are four categories, each with a name –i.e. vegetables– and several small images of examples of that category.

At the bottom, the image that has to be categorized –i.e. as a bunch of asparagus–, which surely corresponds to one of the four categories listed above, but may or may not correspond to one of the small images that appear inside that category.

All the student has to do is touch the right category. By doing this he will hear a nice sound and move on to a new exercise. If he fails, a short “beep” will sound and the same screen will remain, and so until he chooses the right category.

When you have done this 10 times, a message of congratulation appears and invites the student to decide whether to continue or not with another group of 10 exercises.

The company indicates that there are 16 categories: vegetables, bakery items, fruit, kitchen items, clothing, school, toys and games, sport, electronics, the doctor, the beach, vehicles, nature, animals, birds and musical instruments. In my tests I found all but the last, and each has at least 10 different images, so the total should be around the 200 images.

Simple but free

NL Concepts Autism: Sort & Categorize does that and nothing more. The assignment of categories and images to use every time is completely random, and there is no option to set any details, to use more “attractive” sounds, to change texts or to add new images. For now there is only an iPhone version and its only in English, although the importance of language is low as it mainly affects the titles of the categories.

In exchange for these limitations, if the app fits with your needs, the good news is that it is completely free.

-Francesc Sistach

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NL Concepts Autism: Sort & Categorize 2.0

Web: www.nlconcepts.com

Developer: Natural Learning Concepts Inc.

Languages: English.

Functions: Image categorization exercises.

iPhone/iPod touch version: Yes.

iPad version: No.

Price: Free.

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This post is also available in: Spanish