Emotion Detective
Kids should use the app individually, either independently or with a teacher’s help. Each emotion exercise has a few prompts for discussion or extension, which help deepen learning beyond simple responses to multiple-choice questions. Discussion can go beyond the limited prompts provided as teachers and kids explore what emotions are, how to express them, how to read them, and what are appropriate and constructive ways to interact with others. Teachers could also role-play the same or similar scenarios in the classroom to allow kids to practice expressing different emotions and interacting with one another in safe ways. Teachers can set up separate accounts for each kid and print certificates when they complete all four challenges.
Continue readingKids create a detective portfolio with a picture and their name, then choose from four detective scenarios describing crises in the land of Emotiana. A number of emotional awareness exercises follow, including depicting emotions (happy, scared, disgusted, etc.) with real and animated faces, choosing the correct emotion in a multiple-choice format, taking pictures of faces showing different emotions and using the pictures to draw on areas of the face that change with each emotion, listening to a conversation and identifying how a character is feeling, and looking at a picture and using body language and context to choose the appropriate phrase or emotion. Interspersed are “Where’s Waldo” type tasks, in which kids must find a missing item. When kids finish all the emotion exercises and locate all the missing items, they've "solved" the mystery. Kids can save their progress mid-game and create multiple accounts.
The emotional awareness activities provide a good variety of exercises for learning how to identify and express emotions in different ways and based on different cues (body language, context, conversation and tone of voice, facial expression, and movement of specific facial muscles). The activities provide great practice for kids who have difficulty reading emotions in others, or expressing emotions themselves, although they would be improved by more diversity in actors and situations.
The detective story narrative is underdeveloped and disconnected from everything else. The search activity is a break from the difficult task of identifying emotions, and clearly draws from the theory that kids with ASD tend to be good at picking out details while ignoring background or context. The app would be greatly improved, however, if the detective story were more seamlessly bound to the emotion-identifying activities. Still, the emotion activities are worth looking into, if you can pay the price.
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