Stuck In The Middle With You: A Project About Crossing The Midline
This project is a video game that encourages crossing the midline and is a successful and viable way of crossing the midline. The midline is an invisible line dividing your body in half by the left and right sides. It is important to utilize the midline if both parts of the body are to be used simultaneously. This facilitates coordination and communication between the left and right hemispheres of the brain. Crossing the midline of the body starts as early as childhood when infants learn to reach out with both hands for objects. Autism Spectrum Disorder (ASD) is a neurodevelopmental disorder that affects how the brain develops. A child with ASD may typically not want to or have trouble crossing the midline. A child must develop a strong midline to be properly coordinated. This project aims to create a video game designed to improve children with autism’s ability to cross the midline. This is important because it is an engaging way to practice crossing the midline. My main question is “To what extent would a comprehensive video game designed for autistic children be able to improve their ability to cross the midline?”. My experiment tests the hypothesis, “If I create a video game designed to improve children with autism’s ability to cross the midline, then they will have an improved ability to cross the midline because my video game encourages crossing the midline.”. My game will be tested for effectiveness by having a baseline card test and a card test at the end of the experiment to see if the game actually works. I will also have another group who will also do the card test twice, but they will not play my video game. This will enable me to more precisely test to see if my video game works. My video game designed for children was quite simple, yet effective because it improved and strengthened the midline of all of my test subjects. I tested my subjects by having them participate in a card test on the first and fifth day of the experiment and I had them play my game every day for five days. My game was extremely effective because within 5 days, on average the growth in a subject’s ability to cross the midline grew by 41.96%. This was tested by the increase in points gained from the card test. The control group who did not play the game had their score decrease on average by roughly 2.39%. The next step would be to contact Autism BC or Pacific Autism Family Network and see if I could test on children with an Autism Spectrum Disorder. I feel that the result of this extra testing could be useful to further my study and I could turn my study into an innovation by creating an app that could have all kinds of young children and the growth would be even more significant with children who have an Autism Spectrum Disorder.
