They'll do one more for Pep.
Digital lessons are the on-screen part of the ARIS curriculum. Learners practice the skills you teach at the table, with the same pictures, and every answer is saved to their record.
Digital Lesson · Independent trial
Live
What one lesson looks like
The learner hears a word and touches the matching picture. A lesson is a few of these on one skill the teacher picks.
-
“Find the dog.”
The instruction is spoken, and three real photographs come up.
-
They touch the dog.
It grows and comes forward, so they see they got it. Early on, the right card is outlined until they no longer need the help.
-
Pep comes bounding in.
The friend they chose celebrates, in his own voice. That is why they do the next one.
-
Digital lessons history
Receptive Labeling · 2D Picture Nouns
86%
6 of 7 correct · today
It is already written down.
Every answer is scored and saved with the date, automatically.
Hear a word. Choose the matching picture.
Children practice understanding spoken words by choosing the picture that matches what they hear—a skill ABA teams call receptive labeling. Lessons start with basics like body parts and familiar objects, then move on to more complex concepts like letters, money, and telling time.
Words and the world
- Body parts
- Picture nouns: foods, animals, vehicles, clothing, toys and more
- Familiar people, from your own photos
- Colors
- Occupations and community helpers
- Verbs
- Features
- Functions
- Classification
- Boy, girl, man or woman
Reading readiness
- Lowercase letters
- Uppercase letters
- Sight words
- Phonics
Feelings and everyday life
- Five basic emotions
- What object would you use?
- Community helper functions
- Safety signs
Math readiness
- 2D shapes
- Numbers 1 to 10
- Numbers 11 and up
- Comparisons
- Time, digital
- Time, analog
- Money
The lessons draw on a library of more than 2,200 photographs and 1,300 word and number cards, and you can build lessons of your own on anything else. With the full ARIS curriculum, digital lessons give on-screen practice for 25 of its lessons.
Before any of it
Kids meet the friends in a cartoon first
Three to five friends, a small problem, solved together. At the end one of them turns to the child and asks who they want to play with, and that question is the preference check. Nobody is picking between strangers.
The Meadow Pack
Fetch!
The end of Fetch!, and the question the whole check turns on. Pep asks it; the choices are Pep, Velvet, Trill and Juni.
The Springs Line Crew
First to the Station
A different group, in a different corner of town. Zoomer the car introduces himself, with Tempo the train beside him.
Animals, vehicles and toys, across five cartoons, which is deliberate. A child who does not care about a dog gets a train.
Why start with a cartoon?
- Children with autism learn from animated characters. In a study of The Transporters, a cartoon of vehicles with real faces, 20 autistic children aged 4 to 7 watched it every day for four weeks.
- Their emotion recognition improved significantly more than a matched group who did not watch it, and ended level with typically developing children.
- A later trial with 77 children found the gains carried over to new faces and situations, and were still there three months on.
- Learning by watching works. A meta-analysis of 23 studies found that video modeling helps children and teenagers with autism learn new skills, keep them over time and use them with new people and in new places.
- ARIS has its own cartoons, not The Transporters. They work on the same idea: a learner meets the friends on screen before being asked to choose one.
Sources
- Golan et al. (2010). Enhancing emotion recognition in children with autism spectrum conditions: an intervention using animated vehicles with real emotional faces. Journal of Autism and Developmental Disorders.
- Gev, Rosenan & Golan (2017). Unique effects of The Transporters animated series and of parental support on emotion recognition skills of children with ASD. Autism Research.
- Bellini & Akullian (2007). A meta-analysis of video modeling and video self-modeling interventions for children and adolescents with autism spectrum disorders. Exceptional Children.
Or watch one all the way through
Forty seconds, sound on. This is the whole of Fetch! — the same thing a learner watches before they are asked to choose.
Built in, not bolted on
ARIS asks the child who they want to play with
Everything on this page depends on one thing: that the child actually wants what is on the other side of a correct answer. So ARIS does not ask an adult to guess. It runs a preference assessment, on the tablet, as a lesson of its own.
Lesson 1 · Digital
Live
● a tap on Pep
Lesson 1 · Digital
Live
Lesson 1 · Digital
Live
Lesson 1 · Digital
Marcus's picks today
3 sets · Saved to Marcus's digital reinforcers
- 1 Pep 3 of 3
- 2 Nova 2 of 3
- 3 Kip 1 of 3
It measures, it doesn't ask
Set after set, which one they reach for first and keep reaching for — the same logic a team would run by hand with a clipboard and a stopwatch, without the clipboard.
This is why the reward keeps working. A reinforcer an adult picked stops working by Thursday; one the child picked, and re-picked, keeps a learner coming back to the table.
Why let the child choose their reward?
- A reward only works if the child actually wants it, so ARIS finds out instead of guessing.
- A review of 30 studies with people with severe developmental disabilities found that offering choices led to less inappropriate behavior and more appropriate behavior.
- The same review found that preference assessments, like the check ARIS runs, reliably pick out the things that work as rewards.
Sources
Every learner can start out right
Switch errorless teaching on and the correct card is outlined from the very first trial — “Find the cow,” and the cow is already highlighted. The learner responds, succeeds, and the prompt withdraws on the schedule you chose, until the trial that counts is one they did on their own.
Children who have failed at something a hundred times stop trying it. Being right from the start is how you get a hundred-and-first attempt — and it takes one click to set up, for one learner or the whole class.
Why does errorless teaching work?
- A systematic review gathered 28 studies of errorless teaching with 283 people with intellectual and developmental disabilities.
- In most of them, errorless methods improved how well learners told pictures and objects apart: the same skill a digital lesson's "Find the cow" practices.
- The prompt is faded step by step, so the learner keeps being right while the help is taken away.
Sources
Digital Lesson · Prompted trial
Live
The same pictures they handle at the table
Build a lesson from the photo library — foods, animals, vehicles, everyday objects, verbs — or drop in your own pictures: a child's own cup, their own dog. The photographs are the ones printed on the Language Builder cards in the box, so the cow a child sorts in their hands is the cow they tap on the screen.
So a skill practiced on the tablet is not a second skill to learn: the same picture, the same question, at the table and on the screen.
Why real photographs instead of drawings?
- The closer a picture is to the real thing, the easier it is to understand. A study of 40 nonspeaking people with intellectual disabilities, autistic learners among them, found a clear order of difficulty: real objects easiest, abstract symbols and written words hardest.
- Color matters too. Autistic children understood color photographs more easily than line drawings, and carried a new word over to the real object more often when it was taught with a color picture.
- That is why the lessons use the same color photographs as the printed cards in the kit.
Sources
- Mirenda & Locke (1989). A comparison of symbol transparency in nonspeaking persons with intellectual disabilities. Journal of Speech and Hearing Disorders.
- Hartley & Allen (2015). Iconicity influences how effectively minimally verbal children with autism and ability-matched typically developing children use pictures as symbols in a search task. Autism.
- Hartley & Allen (2015). Symbolic understanding of pictures in low-functioning children with autism: the effects of iconicity and naming. Journal of Autism and Developmental Disorders.
Digital Lesson · Independent trial
Live
The same photographs, printed on cards
Teach the lesson. Results are recorded automatically.
See each learner’s accuracy and results by target, with the date saved for every session. There’s no need to record responses by hand or enter them afterward.
When it’s time to write a progress report, the data is ready to review.
Why does recording every trial matter?
- When teachers in special education track progress regularly and act on it, students learn more.
- A meta-analysis of 21 controlled studies found an average effect size of 0.70, a substantial gain for a change in how teaching is checked rather than what is taught.
- How the data was displayed was one of the things that changed the size of the gain.
Sources
Reporting · Digital Lessons History
Live
Twenty-one friends, and a town they live in
ARIS Springs is getting ready for a show. Every friend has a species, a pack and a voice of their own. Hover one to meet them.
Pep
Dachshund · The Meadow Pack
Host of the ARIS Stage and first to cheer for anyone. He celebrates with a tennis-ball leap, a frisbee catch or a belly-up wiggle, all big feelings. A long little dachshund with floppy ears and a tail that never stops.
In Fetch!: Pep's ball lands in a bush, and Trill, Juni and Velvet help him get it back.
Each friend has moves of their own, so the one a child picked never gets boring and never turns into one animation they learn to tune out.
Five cartoons, one town
The friends a child chooses between are friends they have met
Each cartoon follows one group through a small problem they solve together. So when the question comes, a learner is picking a friend they have watched, not a button.
- Fetch! — Pep's ball lands in a bush, and Trill, Juni and Velvet help him get it back.
- First to the Station — Rumble's big load blocks Tempo's track, and Lulu makes room so everyone still gets to the station.
- The Big Flower — The big flower is droopy, so Digby brings water, Fern sneezes, and slow and steady, it grows.
- Splash Show — Wink's magic hat floats away down the creek, and Coral brings it back so the show can go on.
- Off to the Show! — Tum-Tum has no legs to get to the show, so Breezy and Nova fly him there and the Stage Crew puts on a show.
It is not something you park a child on
There is no endless path to wander down and no reward for time spent. A digital lesson is a set of trials an adult set up, for a skill that adult chose, and it ends. Each of these is yours to set, for each learner.
-
Which cards
The card library or your own pictures: a child's own cup, their own dog.
-
How much help
Where prompting starts and how quickly it fades, for each learner and each skill.
-
What a wrong answer does
Some learners need a gentle “almost”. Others are thrown by it.
Try again “Almost” -
Sound
A shared table and a learner sensitive to noise need different things.
On Quiet Off -
Who appears
The learner's own favorites, found by the preference check, not guessed at.
-
On paper or on screen
The same lesson runs with printed cards, and the data lands in the same record.
For schools and districts
Digital lessons come with ARIS
In a classroom the screen is the smaller half. The kit brings the skills a screen cannot teach, like zipping a coat or waiting a turn, the printed cards these photos come from, and a lesson page a paraprofessional can pick up and teach. Both halves land in one record.
Teaching at home? See ARIS for families →
Try it with one of your own learners
Twenty minutes with someone who has taught this population, and a learner you are stuck on.