Profile

I’m originally from Dumfries (in Scotland) but moved to Glasgow 9 years ago to study at university, and I’ve stayed there since. My favourite thing about Glasgow are the chips, the parks, and of course, the lovely weather! I would love to have my own cat but we can’t get a pet in the place I’m staying in right now, but I do like to visit the local cat cafe to get my feline fix. I spend most of my working week on buses/trains and in schools, and my weekends away up in the Scottish mountains.

One big area that I research is about how technology can encourage children’s social interactions and play. Technology is now a huge part of almost everyone’s daily life, and when used correctly, can be very helpful. For example, using google maps to find your way around a new city, and using social media to keep in touch with distant friends. Mums and dads can be worried about young people using technology, because technologies like the ones we have today weren’t around when they were younger.

One worry is that technology can ‘cut people off’ from the real world – but for children with autism, the real world can be so overwhelming that technology may help them make sense of this world around them, and it may be easier to children with autism to interact with other people while using technology. For example, face to face interaction might make some children with autism uncomfortable, so they may choose to keep in touch with friends via text message or on the phone.

I watch and take videos of children playing with different toys (digital and non-digital, and different digital toys too) to see how much they interact with other people when they use it. I watch back the videos and note moments where children did interact with others, and then try to discover how the technology may have helped them to make that interaction (for instance, did the child get stuck and ask for help, or did the toy make a noise).

Since working from home, my days are mostly the same! They used to be rather exciting where I’d get to travel to schools or go to museums and meet lots of children, but we can’t do that at the minute. Instead, I am working on making sense of lots of data that we have already collected pre-Covid. Some days I might watch a lot of videos of children playing with different toys and try to score how ‘social’ their play is, and othe days I might spend a lot of time doing sums and calculations in different spreadsheets. Right now because I work on different projects I usually have a lot of different things to do in a given day, so I’ll work through them. I spend lots of time at my computer, and very little else! Sometimes I will go for a walk to break the day off, I enjoy going to the local coffee shops nearby – they all do very good pastries. Other times I will have lots of video meetings with other researchers and colleagues, which can involve a lot of changes to plan and setting out next steps for my tasks the following week.