Connecting Education for Autistic Children through Technology

1. How has the Internet empowered you to achieve your goals? Has it helped you find resources, connect with interesting people, get inspired? The Internet can serve a different purpose for every single person - tell us how the Internet has helped you find a job, start a business, or learn something new!

Internet has been an integral part of my student and career life since 2001. Through this platform I have been able to learn about my passion and dream and has given me access to tools and forums from which I could learn and take ideas on how build my business, improve my career and create good rapports with people as part of creating and building fruitful relationships. I have been able to meet new people and learn very essential things about my initiatives in Bangladesh and tips and advice on how I can make things better. It has allowed me to stay connected to people whom I have met in various workshops, training, competitions and hangouts to keep in touch over time.

Every individual has been a key contributor to my learning till date. Through the internet I have got to know about so many interesting platforms globally which takes place and it inspires me to participate in them as part of the youth and women empowerment involvements to help my community. In previous years I had been fortunate to participate in the Imagine Cup 2012 and be a national champion by putting together a project to help farmers produce more yielding crops through better utilization of fertilizers. We had got to know about through the internet and had participated in it. It was social awareness globally about our initiative through so many information online portals. Afterwards, I learned about Dell Education Innovation Challenge 2013 through the internet via friend and participated in that as well with my initiative to bridge the gap between education and technology for autistic children and became the semi-finalist there.

In 2014, I won with my project at GIST Boot Camp funded by U.S Department promoting tech start-ups with innovating solutions. This has been only possible through internet because I got to learn about the start-up community through a Facebook invite via a friend last year and has been participating in start-up competitions in Dhaka with my project and ever since then it has been a life changing experience by being part of this community. Since, I was a part of this community from last year, I was able to learn about their new initiatives and that has lead me to where I am now. I got connected to so many potential mentors and stakeholders who are key for my project to prosper in the local market.

My initiative is called Buckets Engineer and every since last year I have been working hard to establish and implement my project into a real-time organization to empower care-givers of autistic children which includes all the community stakeholders affiliated with autism starting from parents to doctors and researchers to be in connected community to help each other out via technological intervention resulting in higher developments in autistic children. The ultimate goal is to help the autistic children learn better and eventually lead a better independent life through a fun and effective learning process aided by technological interventions. Our goal is to identify each children's interest and groom them accordingly and take them through three distinct phases of development. We want to engage these children through art and music and help them through each difficulties by cultivating their interests in the right way to harvest their development in the right way.

Through online web based solution, now the teachers and educations along with parents can monitor and track how their autistic children are performing and can take better measures to identify and solve the problems. The online community of this network of stakeholders allows parents/care-givers to learn about others’ experiences and take advice from that to help their special needs children. Parents can express their concerns and get instant help from the others. This is one of the crucial goals we are targeting to achieve.

I have gotten to learn about various tools and interventions on the internet and have been reaching out to the community members in the US and Dubai to help us put together this project properly in terms of knowledge transfer. Through email, Skype, Facebook, Pin Interest we are sharing our knowledge. Personally, I am able to conduct so many online researches and avail research materials on autism, business development, recruiting people, sharing our initiative and spreading awareness that it has made it so much easier have access to information and educate myself and my team members.

Geographical barriers have been broken and it has lead to higher utilization of time and resources because with my team members and community members who are willing to help us are being able to continuously keep in touch and share progress and updates on recent developments on our initiative.

It always help bring the best of me and allows me to gather a pool of talented people together to make positive changes.