Traverse City Area Public Schools (TCAPS) is launching a pilot program that will put iPads in the hands of students with autism.

“The purpose is to see if we can tailor the instrument to the individual child and remove the barrier of language,” says TCAPS Executive Director of Elementary and Special Education Jame McCall. “We’re quite excited about it.”

Nine students throughout the district with Autism Spectrum Disorder (ASD) will receive the TCAPS-purchased iPads. Seven are in elementary school, and two are in middle school.

ASDs are a group of developmental disabilities that can cause significant social, communication and behavioral challenges. An average of one in 110 children in the United States have an ASD, according to the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention.

Approximately 100 K-12 students at TCAPS have ASD, McCall notes, not including students already being helped by the Traverse Bay Area Intermediate School District.

The pilot will run through the end of the school year. Whether more students are added in the future depends on the pilot’s outcome.

“We want to make sure it’s an effective tool for learning. If it’s just a toy, it doesn’t meet our needs,” McCall notes. “If we see it’s significant, then we’ll expand for select students based on their needs.”

While computers designed for autistic children are already on the market, experts like the iPad’s portability, cheaper price and “coolness” factor. Because the iPad is a “socially-acceptable medium,” TCAPS administrators have high hopes students will use them both in and out of school.

“And if the apps work at the middle-school level, we would like to see it move from an iPad to an iPod, which is more socially acceptable and less bulky.”

The devices are loaded with applications specific to each student’s needs. Teachers and parents will spend a week familiarizing themselves with them before students start tapping away.

Here are three examples of apps students will be using:

Stories2Learn: Parents and educators can use this app to develop their own stories and download pictures, sound and text. “Many students with autism learn through social stories,” McCall notes, “and this app helps you create the story with the learning you want to occur.”

My Choice Board: This app presents a visual display of choices to those with limited communication skills. “It’s difficult to assess a child with autism, so we can do a number of things with this app, from choosing what snack they would like to eat, to giving them a choice of sight words,” she says.

Grace: Designed by a mother of two autistic children in Ireland, this customizable app helps autistic and other special needs children to communicate effectively by building sentences from relevant images.

McCall sought feedback on the pilot from the head of the Autism Research Network (ARN) of Northwest Michigan, a nonprofit organization that strives to bring resources and support to families with ASD.

Marlow Franklin, president of ARN and mother of a seven-year-old who’ll be testing the iPad, says the general consensus from the autism community is the pilot is a “great opportunity.”

“Our kids have communication disorders, so we hope this will be a springboard for them to show us what they know,” she says. “It’s frustrating for us and for them – if you think about the standardized test. Through the iPad, we hope we’ll be able to be more aware of what they know.”