Children with Autism Spectrum Disorder (ASD) often encounter substantial difficulties in social interaction, which directly affect their autonomy, emotional well-being, and overall quality of life. Although numerous technological and methodological interventions have demonstrated potential in mitigating these challenges, the field still lacks a comprehensive synthesis that examines existing strategies, evaluates their effectiveness, and identifies the critical elements that contribute to their success. This study seeks to address this gap by conducting a systematic mapping review focused on the current state of technology-assisted interventions aimed at enhancing social skills in children with ASD. The review explores key questions, including the types of technologies and tools currently available, the ways in which simulated environments have been employed, the specific benefits these interventions offer for developing social competencies, and the most effective approaches and design methodologies used in their implementation. Our findings highlight the central role of co-design practices, personalized content, and open-source platforms in ensuring that interventions are adaptable to the diverse and individualized needs of children with ASD. However, the review also identifies a significant limitation in the field: the widespread absence of long-term validation and standardized evaluation protocols, which undermines the generalizability and reproducibility of reported outcomes. We find a set of good practices for designing and implementing social skills interventions, emphasizing the importance of early and sustained involvement of stakeholders, modular and flexible design frameworks, and the use of open-source tools to promote scalability, accessibility, and sustainability. This work offers a consolidated foundation for both researchers and practitioners, and underscores the urgent need for longitudinal studies and the establishment of consensus-driven metrics to rigorously assess the efficacy of ASD-focused interventions.

Developing educational tools aimed at children with disabilities is a challenging process for designers and developers because existing methodologies or frameworks do not provide any pedagogical information and/or do not take into account the particular needs of users with some type of impairment. In this study, we propose a framework for the design of tools to support teaching to children with disabilities. The framework provides the necessary stages for the development of tools (hardware-based or software-based) and must be adapted for a specific disability and educational goal. For this study, the framework was adapted to support literacy teaching and contributes to the design of educational/interactive technology for deaf people while making them part of the design process and taking into account their particular needs. The experts' evaluation of the framework shows that it is well structured and may be adapted for other types of disabilities.

Communication is a fundamental process in collaborative work. In natural conditions, communication between team members is multimodal. This allows for redundancy, adaptation to different contexts, and different levels of focus. In collaborative virtual environments, however, hardware limitations and lack of appropriate interaction metaphors reduce the amount of collaboration. In this poster, we propose the design and use of a vibrotactile language to improve user intercommunication in CVE and, consequently, to increase the amount of effective collaboration.

Programs Computer Science in Latin America have suffered in recent years very large growth. However, in many cases their programs are not befitting a curriculum model that allows adaptation to any country of the region or the world. This paper presents an experience of building a model based on the Computing Curricula that allow it to be adopted in various parts of Latin America.

Collaboration in 3D environments has the main goal of attaining a high degree of teamwork by exposing the team to a suitable level of immersion. However, users within virtual environments have limitations to perceive the same stimuli of the real world. Particularly, the feeling of presence and nearness of the other is difficult to be generated in VR systems. This poster presents a work in progress that shows our current results on evaluating the impact of three different proximity cues for generating awareness of the presence of other. The design of each cue aims at independently stimulating the senses of sight, hearing and touch. The experiment design includes the comparison with a baseline condition in virtual environments where no specific stimulation is applied.

Any human-computer interface imposes a certain level of cognitive load to the user task. Analogously, the task itself also imposes different levels of cognitive load. It is common sense in 3D user interfaces research that a higher number of degrees of freedom increases the interface cognitive load. If the cognitive load is significant, it might compromise the user performance and undermine the evaluation of user skills in a virtual environment. In this paper, we propose an assessment of two immersive VR interfaces with varying degrees of freedom in two VR tasks: risk perception and basic object selection. We examine the effectiveness of both interfaces in these two different tasks. Results show that the number of degrees of freedom does not significantly affect a basic selection task, but it affects risk perception task in an unexpected way.

Software engineering education has been recognized as an important challenge in computer science undergraduate programs. Instruction in such area requires not only to deliver theoretical knowledge, but also to perform practical experiences that allow students to assimilate and apply such knowledge.

Interactive television (iTV) is the convergence of television with digital media technologies. iTV must be treated as a unique medium with its own set of constraints and opportunities. A set of principles to follow, when designing iTV applications, is presented. Heuristics to be applied when evaluating iTV applicationspsila usability is described.

One of the most important aspects of groupware systems is the concept of awareness, which refers to the perception and knowledge of the group and its activities. This paper extends a previously developed ontology-based conceptualization for the development of user interfaces in groupware systems that support awareness. Specifically, we are interested in domain-independent design groupware. We propose an awareness ontology that conceptualizes the most important aspects of awareness in such systems and can be used to automatize the development of their user interfaces. In order to validate the usefulness of this ontology, we have related the concepts included in our ontology to the awareness dimensions exposed in a well-known awareness framework.

In this paper we propose a conceptual framework for the design the groupware user interface. It supports the interface design enabling integration with software development processes through UML notation. We studied relevant proposals in the domain of CSCW and HCI. Taxonomy is defined in order to classify concepts from those proposals. Finally, the taxonomy is populated for defining main concepts of the conceptual framework.