Autism: Implications for Inclusive Education with respect to Software Engineering

Within Computer science and Software engineering, the prevalence of students with a diagnosis of autism spectrum disorder is relatively high. Ideally, education should be inclusive, with which we mean that education must be given in such a way that additional support is needed as little as possible. In this paper, we present an overview on what is known about the cognitive style of autistic individuals and compare that cognitive thinking style with computational thinking, thinking as an engineer, and with academic thinking. We illustrate the cognitive style of autistic students with anecdotes from our students. From the comparison, we derive a set of guidelines for inclusive education, and we present ideas for future work.