Realworld Adventures Turns COVID-19 into a Software Autism Adventure
While in lock-down, Realworld Adventures founder decides to create Autism Learning Tools
[Plant City, Florida, For Immediate Release] — Upon returning from a year of outdoor adventures in Africa, Livio Bestulic, owner of Realworld Adventures, found himself in COVID-19 lock-down at his daughter’s home in Plant City, Florida. The prospect of returning to his seasonal home in Italy seemed remote and even foolhardy, so he settled in for a long stay and looking after his autistic eight-year-old granddaughter. It soon became apparent that devices and apps were the new normal for children and adults in lock-down or self-quarantine. But he also observed that his autistic granddaughter struggled with the apps her siblings spent endless hours playing.
Livio then began to search for apps that would engage a bored, special needs, housebound child. The search returned few prospects that were educational, low-key (calming), and free (freemium was the norm).
These fruitless searches lead Livio to start the LizzyB.org project. Livio would devote his COVID-19 lock down time to designing a fun and totally free learning app for LizzyB. Two months and numerous prototypes later the LizzyB app was officially launched on Google Play, then amazon apps market place, and finally today on the App Store.
The LizzyB app contains 6 lessons/games that focus on specific brain development objectives, while also being fun and yes, totally free. The app contains a simple User Interface to channel the child’s movement through the levels but sophisticated configuration options for parents to customizable the learning experience as well as meet state homeschooling record-keeping requirements. An addition 4 lessons/games are in development to complete the project objective of 10 lessons and 100 levels.
Based on the above experience, Autism Counting 123, a second App focused specifically on learning numbers was developed. This App’s unique learning methods include written and spoken instructions in English, Croatian, Portuguese, Spanish, German and Italian.
At the onset of the project Livio recalled Neal Stephenson’s 1995 novel, Diamond Age, in which a Honk Kong technician designs an interactive book to function as the social and educational companion to a lonely little girl. “Based loosely on the novel, my goal was to create a custom learning app for my granddaughter first, and then give it to the world (for free) as a by-product,” Livio said.
Livio Bestulic is the owner of the RealworldAdventures.com blog, the 3minuteAdventures YouTube channel with over 1.21 million views and now LizzyB.org.
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