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

This paper introduces Interactive Social Stories (ISS), an approach that extends the traditional Social Stories intervention for children with autism spectrum disorder (ASD) by adding branching narrative structures and meaningful variability drawn from interactive storytelling. The authors describe FriendStar, a tablet-based game designed for children aged 9 to 13 that teaches greeting and friend-making skills in a school setting. The central motivation is the challenge of stimulus generalization, the transfer of a learned social response to varied circumstances, which the authors argue branching and variable scenarios may help promote. The work is framed as a preliminary investigation, with an efficacy study planned for future work.

The preliminary user study involved five children with high-functioning ASD (ages 12 to 13) paired with their caregivers, and four health professionals, including behavior analysts and school psychologists. Participants completed the 15-item Intervention Rating Profile (IRP-15) on a six-point Likert scale and took part in interviews or a focus group. Children and caregivers responded very favorably, with mean ratings in the "agree" range across all items and unanimous willingness to recommend the game. Professionals were considerably more skeptical, with mean ratings on several items falling between "slightly agree" and "slightly disagree," particularly regarding effectiveness for behaviors beyond greeting, and they cited the lack of efficacy data as the primary reason.

Both groups identified the ability to make mistakes and correct them as the most valued feature, a capability traditional paper-based Social Stories do not support. Reported weaknesses included the repetitive structure across days, limited topic variety, a lack of a female player character, and the desire for therapist-controlled options such as hints, pause functions, and reward adjustments. Telemetry showed the longest play session was nine minutes, and some children's attention waned toward the end, prompting plans to shorten and diversify content. The authors acknowledge that the sample is very small and that effectiveness remains untested, positioning the findings as evidence of usability and acceptability rather than clinical efficacy.