The Transporters 交通之友

Autistic children learn emotions and facial expressions through fun videos.

The Transporters 交通之友 is a fun video series to help autistic children understand the causes of emotions, and the facial expressions that go with them.

How does it work?

Many autistic children love predictability. The Transporters 交通之友 was designed to harness this love of predictability by making all the characters in the episodes vehicles that move in a predictable way, such as trains, trams and cable cars that move along tracks.

What’s novel is that each vehicle has a real human face ‘grafted’ onto it which moves in a life-like way. Whilst each vehicle is an animation, the faces are from actors showing real human emotions.

Even without realising it, when an autistic child is watching the train or the cable car going along tracks, they are getting an opportunity to look at faces, and to learn how different situations give rise to different emotions.

Research shows that even after watching The Transporters 交通之友 for just 15 minutes per day for one month, autistic children improve significantly in their emotion recognition ability.

What’s included

15 episodes that your child can stream over and over again

Created by educational experts and speech and language professionals

Available in English, Cantonese Chinese, and Mandarin Chinese (subtitle options in Traditional Chinese and Simplified Chinese)

The Transporters 交通之友 can be used at school, at home or even in a clinic

Backed by research

The Transporters 交通之友 App is clinically proven [https://doi.org/10.1177/13623613231187176] to help autistic children 2-6 years old to recognise the causes of emotion and the facial expressions that go with them.

The development and evaluation of The Transporters 交通之友 DVD was funded by the UK Government Department for Culture, Media and Sport (DCMS) and was developed by Professor Sir Simon Baron-Cohen and Professor Jon Drori.

The development and evaluation of The Transporters 交通之友 App was funded by the Hong Kong SAR Government Health Bureau Health and Medical Research Fund and was developed by Professor Patrick Wing-Leung Leung, Dr. Teddy Cheung, and Dr. Janice Chan. The App was made available for free downloads in Hong Kong by the generous funding from the Heep Hong Society.