Using Interactive Social Story Games to Teach Social Skills to Children with Autism

Abstract

This paper presents interactive social stories (ISS) for teaching social skills to children on the autism spectrum. Using interactive narrative techniques, we enhance the traditional in- tervention of Social Stories in order to facilitate exploration and potentially promote stimulus generalization. Using this approach, we designed a tablet-based ISS game called FriendStar to teach 9-13 year old children with autism the social skills of greeting in the school con- text. The results of our user study show that both health professionals and children with their caregivers reacted positively to FriendStar. Most notably, both groups respond favorably to the ability of making mistakes and correcting them in the game.