Collaborative Technologies for Children with Special Needs

This paper presents a systematic literature review on collaborative technologies for children with special needs in ACM Digital Library. The aim of the review is to (1) reveal the current state of the art, (2) identify the types of technologies and contexts of use, the demographics and special needs of the target group, and the methodological approaches and theoretical groundings, and (3) define a future research agenda. The results of the systematic literature review show that collaborative technologies for children with special needs are increasingly gaining attention, mostly involve tangible and/or embodied interaction, and are often developed for use in the classroom. The target group that is most represented are boys between 6 to 12 years with Autism Spectrum Disorder. The results further show a wide range of evaluation criteria for measuring collaboration, an interchanging use of theoretical concepts and a lack of definitions for the concept collaboration, and a need for more demographically diverse studies.