Answer: Get your child to watch The Transporters DVD series.
The Transporters is an animated DVD series designed to teach children with autism to read human emotions.
The DVD series cost half a million British pounds to create and has been scientifically shown to improve autistic children’s emotion-reading skills. The results sound amazing: The creator of the project, Professor Simon Baron-Cohen, said that after watching The Transporters for just 15 minutes a day for a month, autistic children improved their emotion-reading ability to the level of non-autistic children.
These 2 videos show you Episode One from the series to show you how the idea works — the first video is the US version and the second, the British version:
The Transporters: US/Canada version: www.thetransporters.com
The Transporters has been created specially for children with autism who find it hard to recognize the causes of emotion and the facial expressions that go with them. Narrated by Kerry Shale. www.thetransporters.com
The Transporters: British English version: www.thetransporters.com
The Transporters has been created specially for children with autism who find it hard to recognize the causes of emotion and the facial expressions that go with them. Narrated by Stephen Fry. www.thetransporters.com
In this video, Professor Simon Baron-Cohen explains how the idea works:
The Transporters – How it Works: www.thetransporters.com
In this interview, Simon Baron-Cohen gives some more detail:
“The Transporters”-Dr. Simon Baron Cohen: Beyond the Headlines
And here’s another snippet from another Transporters episode:
The Transporters – Excerpt: “Barney’s Special Day” (US/Canada version)
More information from the The Transporters website:
The Transporters series has been evaluated by the Autism Research Centre for its effectiveness for children aged 4 to 8 with ASC (autistic spectrum condition).
The results are very exciting.
- In all tasks on which the children were tested, most caught up their typically developing peers.
- The results suggest that The Transporters DVD is an effective way to teach emotion recognition to children with ASC and that the learning generalises to new faces and new situations.
- Children with ASC who did not watch the DVD remained below typically developing levels.
Download the full research paper: Enhancing Emotion Recognition in Children with Autism Spectrum Conditions: An Intervention Using Animated Vehicles
with Real Emotional Faces
How much does the DVD series cost, and where can I buy it?
The price quoted today for the 15-episode DVD series and the accompanying parent guide on The Transporters website is $65 US or £49.92 (inc UK VAT)
Sounds like a bargain to me! What’s the downside, apart from the money outlay? In fact, maybe all children could benefit from watching The Transporters! The better our kids can read other people’s expressions and emotions, the better they will get along with others.
