Assisting students with autism to cooperate with their peers to perform computer mouse collaborative pointing operation on a single display simultaneously

•A standard mouse driver can be reset and it default functions extended by software technology.•MCCOP software allows multiple users to operate a single computer simultaneously.•Students with autism can have opportunities to cooperate with their peers to perform collaborative pointing operations through MCCOP.

The purpose of this study was to provide students with autism spectrum disorder (ASD) the chance to cooperate with their peers to perform computer mouse collaborative pointing operation. In this study, we adopted the Single Display Groupware (SDG) concept to develop the Multiple Cursor Collaborative Operating Program (MCCOP) software, which allows multiple users to operate a single computer simultaneously without interfering with each other. With the implementation of MCCOP software, users control their own cursors to perform a function in their respective cursor moving areas on a single display. A collaborative pointing test software (CPTS) program was designed in this experiment to evaluate participants’ collaborative pointing performance. This study adopted an ABAB design, and the experimental results show that all participants significantly increased their collaborative pointing performance during the intervention phase, compared to the baseline phase. Practical and developmental implications of the findings are discussed.