A. Motivating Children With Autism to Learn Through Play as
Dolphin Trainers
Dolphins are highly intelligent marine mammals. Captive
dolphins in oceanariums are always popular among children.
Typically, those dolphins are trained by instructors to follow
their gestures for performance in public. Motivated by dolphin
show which is mostly controlled by gesture-based instruction,
we have, in the Virtual Dolphinarium, all virtual pink dolphins
modeled with gesture recognition functions. A video of the
real dolphin training and dolphin performance is shown to the children with autism before they are invited to the immersive
room. Meantime, they are given chances to do practice on
gesturing for the purpose of better preparing them for the VDI
program. All these warm-ups help them get familiar with the
dolphin training process. The program has a learning element
embedded. Through gesturing and dolphin training, children
with autism can improve their nonverbal communication skills.
Fig. 4(a) shows a professional dolphin instructor training a
real dolphin in the UWS Dolphin Lagoon and Fig. 4(b) shows
a child with autism imitating to be a dolphin trainer within the
Virtual Dolphinarium.