Preparing Autistic Students for the AI Workforce

Software project courses too often focus instruction on technical skills but leave necessary communication and teamwork skills as an exercise for the learner. When autistic students take these courses, they often find difficulty fitting into teams with non-autistic students because of their different styles of communication. To explore how to help autistic students adapt to non-autistic normative software engineering environments, we designed and taught a first-of-its-kind online project course on AI, explicitly teaching communication and teamwork skills with purposefully designed scaffolds. After the course, students were matched with professional, online summer internships in which they could apply the skills they learned. We detail the course structure, including the pedagogical strategies employed and the specific challenges encountered. Our experiences reveal key elements that contributed to the course's success, such as the importance of adaptive teaching methods and the need for carefully considered instructor training for teaching neurodivergent learners in software engineering. We share this report to provide guidance for educators, researchers, and advocates seeking to develop effective computing education programs that include autistic students.