How Youtube and Minecraft helped my autistic son with conceptual thinking

Anthony has the type of autism and ADHD that's often not noticed until it's too late.  Anthony speaks, has good eye contact and understands a lot of what's going on around him.  He's on some medication for his ADHD which means that although he moves about and doesn't always pay attention, he's not bouncing off the walls.   But he still struggles in many areas like other kids with the same conditions.

One of these areas is conceptual thinking. Conceptual thinking is the ability to understand a situation or problem by identifying patterns or connections, and addressing key underlying issues.  It's being able to see and sift through information and picking out the relative parts to understand issues or solve problems.   I've written before about a similar idea of using Batman to help ADHD kids with executive function skills.

There are ways to help kids develop these skills, but sometimes of course they manage a semblance of this by themselves.  David, Anthony's younger autistic brother is quite a way off conceptual thinking, but the other day I saw a glimpse of it in Anthony - all thanks to youtube.

I'd say we were pretty big screen time users in our house.  It's something our family benefits from. However, I've generally been quite careful with youtube.  It's only available on one device that our eldest, Anthony uses, and then only through Safari.  He is also limited to watching it as his younger siblings wouldn't necessarily be safe using it.

I was reading a post on Codakid the other day about 7 Surprising Things That Every Parent Should Know About Minecraft, and was only a little surprised to find that Minecraft is now officially the most watched video game on YouTube.  Stampylonghead has nearly 9 million subscribers and billions of video views.

Anthony has been playing online games including Minecraft for a few years now.  I wrote a post last year about how I was as happy to see him playing Minecraft during the sunny summer holidays as I was to see him outside.   If you have a child with autism who likes this game you may well have heard of Autcraft too. Anthony has learned so much from playing Minecraft.

And it turns out from these Youtubers too.  It was a while ago Anthony discovered them on tube when his Dad was trying to find out how to make Redstone torch for him.  I've always used Youtube the same way - to see how to do things.  Like a sort of video Pinterest.

After that though Anthony started mixing watching motorsports videos with Minecraft ones.  And just like all the motorsports, he was absorbing the information.  I didn't think much about it until Anthony and his Dad were one day playing Minecraft together and something happened.

Somehow, they and their Minecrafty selves got themselves into a strange scenario and also managed to get lost, in their own world.

Think as he may, Anthony's Dad couldn't figure out what to do about it.

They stopped playing for a few days.

Then, Anthony did something new.  Anthony, had an idea.

An idea.

Now, I don't know Minecraft at all.  So bare with me if I get some of this wrong.  But essentially, Anthony pulled two or three bits of seemingly unimportant bits of info from two or three Minecraft Youtubers videos and pieced them together to solve all their problems.  Something about restarting in a different mode to get a map, and then retrieving resources... etc etc I got lost them.  His Dad looked at him.

"Anthony, that's brilliant!" he said.

And we were pleased about so much more than his solution.  This demonstrated to us basic conceptual thinking.  Identification of the important issues, pulling relevant information from different sources and creating a solution.

And I'm in no doubt that Youtube played a role in this.  Anthony is a very visual learner. He can learn from videos better than he can listening to a teacher talk.  He's not the only autistic child that find Youtube invaluable as Faithmummy shows.  And Stephs Two Girls shows Minecraft has been part of her daughter's creativity and find Youtube valuable when it comes to understanding communication.

He may have many challenges ahead of him, but I'm, as always, ever so proud of my son.  And his abilities to help himself grow, can only be a positive thing for the future - even if it's via Youtube.