The Transporters
An online video resource to teach autistic children about emotions. Available in five languages.
The Transporters 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 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 for just 15 minutes per day for one month, autistic children improve significantly in their emotion recognition ability.
Sign up today, for just £24 / $36 / €30 >
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 British and American English, German, Dutch, Hebrew (and free Serbian episode)
- The Transporters can be used at school, at home or even in a clinic
Backed by research
The Transporters is clinically proven to help autistic children 2-8 years old to recognise the causes of emotion and the facial expressions that go with them.
The development and evaluation of The Transporters was funded by the UK Government Department for Culture, Media and Sport (DCMS) and was developed in collaboration with Professor Jon Drori.
“This new animation has been designed to be both entertainment (for preschoolers) and educational: to help children learn to recognise emotions.” Read full article >
The Transporters is available in six languages:
Additional resources for professionals
Based on The Transporters video series, the Autism Centre of Excellence at Cambridge has designed a set of tools, games and activities in English for education professionals and speech therapists, to further help children learn about emotions and facial expressions.
You can purchase the whole bundle for £24/$31.
Backed by research
The Transporters was evaluated by the Autism Research Centre at the University of Cambridge and has shown it can improve emotion recognition.
About Us
The Autism Centre of Excellence at Cambridge (ACE) is a science-led campaigning charity working closely with Cambridge University’s Autism Research Centre. Our aim is to improve access to high quality support and remove barriers and stigma for autistic people.
A partner with
ACE is charity registered in England and Wales, Reg. No: 1191599. Read our Privacy Statement.