It’s been a little over two months since Rebecca Vincent, a Therapist and Learning Support teacher from West Vancouver, Canada, tweeted RoboKind about her student completing his first session. Since then, West Vancouver has been gaining attention as the first school district in Canada to use Milo. Global News checked in with the school district, which has a total of five robots, to see what all the fuss was about.
“My favorite thing about him is that he’s a robot and it’s really cool that a toy can actually do this,” Christian Chorbajian, one of Vincent’s gifted students with autism spectrum disorder, told Global News.
Milo is helping Christian, and other students with ASD improve their conversational and situational skills.
“What sold me on the program was not just the fact that Milo is a robot, which is the draw for the kids and brings them in, but it’s extremely well-researched; it’s designed by a speech pathologist out of Texas, it incorporates best practices in terms of [autism spectrum disorder] research,” Dave Platt, a school district administrator, told Global News.
RoboKind continues to work with autism experts, and the schools that incorporated Milo into their classroom to improve on Robots4Autism curriculum, so that Milo can serve all children on the spectrum.
Check out Global News coverage of Milo and Robots4Autism in West Vancouver.