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

Document Title

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

Document Information

• Topic Area: Enhancing social skills of autistic children (without cognitive impairment) through the design and evaluation of collaborative and turn-taking mechanisms in games.
• Keywords: Autism Spectrum Disorder (ASD), games, turn-taking, social skills, collaboration, digital intervention, fine motor skills, hand-eye coordination

Research Background and Issues

• What problems or challenges did the authors identify?

  1. Autistic children often face challenges in social skills, such as turn-taking in games and interactive collaboration, with turn-taking being a key foundational social ability developed early on.
  2. Existing digital interventions and games can train social skills but often fail to effectively design progressive collaborative models or lack rich narrative coherence.
  3. Many studies and games focus solely on helping children act during their own turn, neglecting the improvement of their ability to pay attention to others’ actions during their turns.

• Why is this issue important?

  1. Social interaction and collaboration skills have significant impacts on autistic children’s daily, academic, and future professional lives.
  2. Enhancing social skills related to turn-taking can help children develop joint attention, resource sharing, and planning abilities, thereby improving their social acceptance.

• Research Motivation and Related Work

  • The study builds on existing collaborative model adjustments (e.g., Silva et al.’s progressive collaboration model and Giusti et al.’s collaboration dimensions) to develop a game for autistic children.
  • Addressing the lack of continuity in current digital interventions, the study aims to improve children’s social interaction abilities through progressive design and turn-based mechanisms, while exploring motivation, engagement, and cross-context transfer potential.

Solution

• What methods or solutions did the authors propose?

  • Developed a two-player collaborative tablet game called “StarRescue,” primarily aimed at cultivating children’s turn-taking mechanisms, resource sharing, mutual planning, and collaboration skills.
  • Combined Silva et al.’s four-stage progressive collaboration model and Giusti et al.’s collaboration dimensions to design a set of progressively complex game levels, featuring unique cooperative roles and task logic.

• What are the innovative aspects of this solution?

  1. Integrated two classic collaboration models (step-by-step training and interaction dimensions) to create a novel collaborative design.
  2. Used game narratives (e.g., rescuing stars, defeating monsters) and a reward system (e.g., spaceship decoration) to stimulate intrinsic motivation in children.
  3. Added training elements for hand-eye coordination and fine motor skills, utilizing touchscreens and visual feedback to enhance children’s perceptual abilities and refined movements.

• What are the implementation steps and key technologies used?

  • Main Game Mechanisms:
    • Ball path navigation: Simulates classic ping-pong games, alternating turns to hit the ball and defeat monsters.
    • Monster elimination: Introduces static or dynamic monsters based on level difficulty, along with special cooperative skills (e.g., freezing and burning).
    • Unique superpowers: Assigns different superpowers to each child, requiring coordination to achieve complex goals.
  • Level Design:
    • Level 1 serves as a single-player tutorial to understand basic mechanisms.
    • Subsequent levels gradually introduce more complex collaboration dimensions, such as resource sharing, strategic allocation, and time-constrained tasks.
    • The reward system uses “game diamonds” and spaceship decoration to enhance motivation for replayability.
  • Technical Support: Developed using the Unity engine, running on the iPad platform.

Research Outcomes

• What specific results were achieved?

  1. Children in the experimental group showed significant improvement in social skills after playing the game, such as reminding partners, task allocation, and negotiation abilities.
  2. The game facilitated the transfer of collaboration and communication skills from within the game to daily life.
  3. The game significantly improved children’s performance in hand-eye coordination and fine motor skills tests.

• What advantages does it have compared to existing solutions?

  1. Provides rich narrative coherence and sustained motivation, rather than isolated small tasks or scenes.
  2. Integrates turn-taking mechanisms and two-player collaboration logic to systematically improve social interaction.
  3. Offers a more comprehensive approach to multi-level protocols (e.g., resource sharing, joint planning) compared to previous single-mode designs.

• What were the experimental or evaluation results?

  1. In a group experiment involving 32 children, the experimental group (20 participants) showed significantly higher scores compared to the control group:
     • Theory of Mind (ToM) Test: Post-test scores in the experimental group significantly increased (from 3.55 to 4.05), while the control group showed no change.
     • Hand-Eye Coordination Test: Post-test scores in the experimental group significantly improved (from 17.95 to 21.50), while the control group showed no significant changes.
     • Fine Motor Skills Test: The experimental group outperformed the control group in post-test trials.
  2. Parental feedback indicated that children engaged in more communication with partners during the game and were willing to attempt more challenging tasks.

• Limitations and Future Directions

  • Limitations:
    1. The study focused only on autistic children without cognitive impairment (AC-NCI), excluding those with cognitive impairments.
    2. The experimental duration was short (3 days), making it difficult to observe long-term effects and real-world application transfer.
    3. Evaluation methods lacked supplementary video recording and more automated behavior tracking technologies.
  • Future Directions:
    1. Expand the application scope to autistic children with cognitive impairments (AC-CI).
    2. Conduct long-term studies in participants’ daily environments to further validate transfer effects.
    3. Enhance analytical tools by using video analysis to capture more comprehensive behavioral performances.
    4. Explore the design of blurred boundaries in games to avoid potential limitations of predefined areas on advanced social skill development.