一句话：设计并讲授首门面向自闭症学生的 AI 在线项目课程，显式训练沟通与团队协作，并衔接暑期实习。
软件项目课程常过度强调技术技能，而把沟通与团队协作能力留给学生自行摸索。自闭症学生因沟通风格差异，往往难以融入非自闭症团队。为此，作者设计并教授了一门面向自闭症学生的 AI 在线项目课程，通过专门脚手架显式教授沟通与协作，并在课程后为学员匹配专业在线暑期实习以应用所学。论文详细介绍了课程结构、教学策略与所遇挑战，并以经验总结的方式提炼成功要素。结果表明，自适应教学方法以及对教师进行神经多样性相关培训至关重要。该经验报告为教育者、研究者和倡导者设计包容自闭症学生的计算教育项目提供了指导。
Software project courses too often focus instruction on technical skills but leave necessary communication and teamwork skills as an exercise for the learner. When autistic students take these courses, they often find difficulty fitting into teams with non-autistic students because of their different styles of communication. To explore how to help autistic students adapt to non-autistic normative software engineering environments, we designed and taught a first-of-its-kind online project course on AI, explicitly teaching communication and teamwork skills with purposefully designed scaffolds. After the course, students were matched with professional, online summer internships in which they could apply the skills they learned. We detail the course structure, including the pedagogical strategies employed and the specific challenges encountered. Our experiences reveal key elements that contributed to the course's success, such as the importance of adaptive teaching methods and the need for carefully considered instructor training for teaching neurodivergent learners in software engineering. We share this report to provide guidance for educators, researchers, and advocates seeking to develop effective computing education programs that include autistic students.
@inproceedings{paperbot9072,
title = {Preparing Autistic Students for the AI Workforce},
author = {JiWoong Jang and Ren Butler and Rory McDaniel and Aidan San and D. Matthew Boyer and Somayeh Asadi and Richard Kubina and Taniya Mishra and Andrew Begel},
booktitle = {FSE},
year = {2025},
doi = {10.1145/3696630.3727233}
}