Milo: Which one shows me looking sad?

Krista Stephens: Milo is a humanoid robot that is specifically designed to work with students with autism. He can make a sad face, he can make a grimace, he can make a surprised face. He does that so that the student can look and be able to imitate.

Audrey: When he was two, my pediatrician brought it to my attention that Nathaniel was not speaking. He said, “You may need to get him looked at, he may have some things going on that you’re unaware of,” and that’s when it came to our attention that Nathaniel had autism. It was intense. He couldn’t tell me what his needs were. I had to figure it out. It took him awhile to actually start to point to things. He started when he was three years old here at Lester, in their preschool program, and it was a success. They have all kinds of tools, resources I wouldn’t have begun to think about.

Janette Williams: Our school specializes in autism. At Lester, we provide a whole realm of services. We have speech, we have OT, PT, extended nursing services, and then assistive technology.

Krista Stephens: Milo works with the student on a different set of modules. It’s nice because it scaffolds as far as how difficult the modules are. Nathaniel is working on the happy, angry, and sad module. So he started out recognizing Milo happy. Then he had to choose between happy and sad. Then they go between three different emotions. So he’s having to visually discriminate between those three emotions.

Brian Denny: We started participating with Milo in October of 2017. We thought it was a unique opportunity for us to be able to provide our high autism population with a service they probably wouldn’t get anywhere else.

Cassandra: I had read about Milo, and the first thing I asked when I got here was, “Hey, do you guys have Milo? I want to get down with this, I’m interested.” For years, nothing else was working, but now JJ has been progressing. There’s less prompting, there’s more independent thought.

Brian Denny: We’ve seen students respond to Milo where they might not respond to another adult. Children with autism, they pick up on human affect, but Milo doesn’t have any emotion, doesn’t get upset. Milo didn’t have to stay up too late the night before. None of that affects Milo, he responds the same way every time.

Krista Stephens: The changes that I have seen is they are able to follow directions better and their visual attention is better. It’s a challenge every day to try to get my students to sit, focus, and answer questions and do a task. So if I can get Milo to help me with that, that’s another way to reach my kids.

Theodore Lester Elementary School