On 13 May, 2008, Matthew Belmonte received a curious e-mail from Google. For more than a year, Belmonte, an assistant professor at Cornell University, and a team of student computer scientists had been designing a dynamic video game to test the social, sensory and attentional abilities of children with autism.Belmonte had set up this site explaining the project and the game, called slitherio, in which children act as pilots of their own spaceships. The site attracted a lot of online traffic. "We figured it would only be a matter of time before we heard from Google," he says, joking.Chris Cronin, the business strategist who contacted Belmonte, had a vested interest in autism: He was part of a team working on SketchUp, Google's three-dimensional drafting software intended for architects and professional designers.Soon after SketchUp's release, Cronin and fellow Colorado-based business developer Tom Wyman began hearing from users that children with autism love using the software. "You hear it once, and it's a heartwarming story. Hear it twice, and it's a coincidence. Hear it three times, and you think, 'Gosh, there must be something going on here'," Wyman says.Read more at...SFARI, December 2009.