Would using a visual food recipe improve independence?

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http://www.cookingforengineers.com/ is somewhat similar. urs looks way cooler tho.

@devilDriver - thanks for the kind words! We think our format is really awesome too. It would be really beneficial for you to be able to give us some feedback as to why you think ours would be better than cookingforengineers - maybe specifically why our format is better for children and adults on the autistic spectrum. Do you have any feelings or comments about this?

I think that this drawing in approach is a good idear. Large amounts of unfamilar information presented all at once as either text or pictures would be overwhelming, I think. I know that they would be overwhelming for me. My work right now is making educational materials for autistic kids, and I break eberrything down into small steps, and make eberrything very visual. I show a picture that is the concept being learned, then apply the verbal label on top, like the picture is the important information (which it is), and the verbal label is just an aide. Usually, the situation is reversed. The important information is verbal, and the picture is just a visual aide that may or may not convey much meaning and may or may not look appealing. Your pictures are very appealing and also informational. The only pitfall that I can see is that they are complex, but once broken down into steps, they would make an eggselent visual cookbook. I really would like to learn to cook more things, but reading recipes, I'm like, uhhhhhhh, what? I dunno what to do, this text is meaningless to me. I studied chemistry in college, and I think that imagining yourself as a chemistry student learning to do chemistry experiments for the first time would put you into the shoes of autistic kids learning to cook. You would probably want eberrything to be broken down into small steps, and know what each step of the reaction looks like, like when this solution is supposed to turn green, and when the naphthalene is supposed to fly up into the fume sucker, eggsept that it is never supposed to fly up into the fume sucker, and that only happened because the text directions didn't mention that you are supposed to cap the container to avoid that unfortunate event.

I think that this is a great project. I am a big believer in creating practical things that work for autistic people to learn things in the ways that work best for them.

Last edited by btbnnyr on 27 Jul 2012, 12:54 am, edited 1 time in total.

@btbnnyr - I think these are really great analogies and I completely agree that when using this concept as a teaching tool it would need to be simplified and broken down into smaller components. I think this can be quite easily done in an iPad/Android application that we plan to create!

As an aside: I studied Chemical Engineering in college and so I completely get your chemistry background and your jokes at the end. This is a great way to think about things and honestly was some of the inspiration for this idea!

Yeah, how large is a "large onion"? I also find recipes are often not specific enough. [B}www.cookingforengineers.com[/B] looks great from that point of view and I like their table-based format at the end. It may as well be called "cooking for Aspies". I really like the GULA example as well, even though I'm not a visual person. I would probably look at that summary picture first, then read the detailed text, then refer to the summary picture again while actually cooking. With regular recipes I find I have to move back and forth between the instructions, the ingredient list and the task at hand too much.