Autism Empowerment through swimming

Around the world, thousands of neurodivergent children pass away from drowning each year. I built a mobile application that prepares autistic children to have success in the water.

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Inspiration

Swimming has played an extremely crucial part in my life. I have swam competitively for both my school and through my club team for almost the past decade. However, recently I have found great joy in coaching kids who are getting into swimming. Mainly, I have worked with the local district's Special Olympic team, a program that facilitates self-confidence for people with ASD through sports, as a volunteer coach. Many of the students are very afraid of the water or have trouble performing certain skills while swimming. My app will get them prepped in way that they are more self assured and better understand the mechanics of swimming

What it does

The app starts off by allowing the user to login or register. Afterwards, it takes the user to the home screen and shows the option to see "safety" or "Learn" images. Once selected, the user can see a gallery of images that guides them in swimming safety and instruction

How we built it

The app was built in flutter, a cross platform application tool, and firebase. The apps core principles are based on a popular teaching method called "primming". The idea is to give the user a visual representation for the task they need to do in the pool. This will allow them to pick up on techniques in the water and overall have more success while swimming.

Challenges we ran into

One of the biggest challenges we ran into was making it as efficient and impactful as possible. Finding the correct words and images to positively stimulate neurodivergent children was a daunting task, as the application would greatly suffer if these things were not accurately tailored. In general, flutter is pretty hard to work with in terms of Ui design

Accomplishments that we're proud of

We are very proud of the user login, which involves integration with Firebase Auth. We are also very proud of being able to push content to any number mobile devices from cloud. Overall, the topic itself is very positive and helpful to many people around the world.

What we learned

A lot of dart and UI programming. We also learned about what children with ASD positively react to in terms of colors, shapes, etc.

What's next for Autism Empowerment through swimming

The next step for Autism Empowerment through swimming is to expand it past swimming. Tasks such as flying in a plane, eating at a restaurant, or even other sports/activities could be greatly benefited by the application. These, hypothetically at least, will be created by users through a custom, curated template. Making this as a platform for parents around the world will make life for children suffering with ASD a lot better.

i can provide a working copy of the application, but need to set up Test Flight.

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