StarRescue: the Design and Evaluation of A Turn-Taking Collaborative Game for Facilitating Autistic Children's Social Skills

Autism Spectrum Disorder (ASD) presents challenges in social interaction skill development, particularly in turn-taking. Digital interventions offer potential solutions for improving autistic children’s social skills but often lack addressing specific collaboration techniques. Therefore, we designed a prototype of a turn-taking collaborative tablet game, StarRescue, which encourages children’s distinct collaborative roles and interdependence while progressively enhancing sharing and mutual planning skills. We further conducted a controlled study with 32 autistic children to evaluate StarRescue’s usability and potential effectiveness in improving their social skills. Findings indicated that StarRescue has great potential to foster turn-taking skills and social communication skills (e.g., prompting, negotiation, task allocation) within the game and also extend beyond the game. Additionally, we discussed implications for future work, such as including parents as game spectators and understanding autistic children’s territory awareness in collaboration. Our study contributes a promising digital intervention for autistic children’s turn-taking social skill development via a scaffolding approach and valuable design implications for future research.