Inclusion of pupils with disabilities into the mainstream classrooms has become an essential part of the education system in the last few decades. One of the fundamental groups influenced by inclusion are children with autism spectrum disorders (ASD) as the prevalence of the diagnosis increases (e.g. Baio et al., 2018). These children, among other things, suffer from the problem of social communication and interaction (American Psychiatric Association, 2013), which can lead to misunderstanding of social rules in the school environment and to the social isolation in the peer group (Bauminger-Zviely, Eden, Zancanaro, Weiss, & Gal, 2013).

The question is – what means could be used to support children with ASD in understanding of and responding properly to social incentives of school environment? First, one of the promising tools targeting social skills are Social Stories by Carol Gray (Gray & Garand, 1993). It is a traditional technique used to describe social situations and help individuals with ASD to understand them and react properly. 

Second, multimedia has a big potential for social training of people with ASD (e.g. Hagiwara & Smith Myles, 1999; Moore & Taylor, 2000; Sansotti & Powell-Smith, 2008; Chen, 2018). Advantages of multimedia for AS children include 1) visual presentation (because they are visual learners) (Odom et al., 2003), 2) absence of human factor which can be for individuals with ASD confusing (Bernardini, Porayska-Pomsta, & Smith, 2014), 3) predictability and control over choices (Yildrim, Ozden, & Aksu, 2001), 4) the possibility of repetition, which may aid in storing new information (Segers & Verhoeven, 2005), 5) inducement of intrinsic motivation (Parsons, Leonard & Mitchell, 2006; Sansotti & Powell-Smith, 2008).

Combination of Social Stories and multimedia can be a suitable solution for enhancement of social skills for individuals with ASD. However, this method is still not explored enough. We are aware of only few studies which have so far examined animated Social Stories (SS) and their influence on the enhancement of social skills (Mandasari & Theng, 2014; Lau & Win, 2018).

Our goal is to develop and examine a learning tool for social skills development of children with ASD within the school environment. We will investigate if animated Social Stories are an effective tool for social skills enhancement of primary school children with ASD. We will focus on children without mental deficits and relatively normal language skills (high-functioning autism/HFA, Asperger syndrome/AS). Our aim is to use animations to represent the social situations in multiple ways and in various environments to reach more flexible perspective of ASD children on given topics as they struggle with the ability of generalizing (Golan & Baron-Cohen, 2006).

We will focus on three main questions: 1) Will animated SS enhance social skills of ASD children who don’t suffer mental and language deficits? 2) Will be ASD children motivated to interact with our tool? 3) Can a tool for social development of ASD children be generally applicable to them despite large differences among them? 

Participants Our participants will be Czech children with AS or HFA of primary school age (6 – 12). We plan to cooperate with teacher assistants and run the research at the mainstream schools. Expected number of participants is around N=12. Materials We plan to develop short interactive animations covering four social situations based on the format of Social Stories. Our intent is to focus on social skills required in the school environment (greeting, asking for help, conversation with schoolmates and calming down in the school environment). Animations will include explicit description of given social situations and possible appropriate reactions – displayed in multiple variants (different environment, people etc.). Procedure We plan to use a single subject design (specifically a reversal design) in which the subjects serve as their own control (Fraenkel, Wallen, & Hyun, 2012, Ch. 14). During the baseline phase which takes place before the intervention we will identify, by means of repeated observations, the level of social skills for given situations. After the baseline phase we will introduce to the participants our intervention which they will undergo for several times and we will continue observing their behavior. Finally, we will remove the intervention and observe participant’s behavior without it. Moreover, we will measure the level of social skills of children by means of simple pre-tests and post-tests and questionnaires (see Bauminger-Zviely et al., 2013). We will also interview their parents, teacher assistants and class teachers.

We expect that interactive animations as a therapeutic learning tool for social skills development within the school environment will enhance social skills of ASD children. We also foresee it could be a beginning of multimedia tools generally applicable to individual but also group work with children with ASD which attend mainstream schools. By the time of the conference, we expect to have preliminary data from the first phase of research at the mainstream schools with a smaller sample of participants (N=6) and these data we would like to discuss at the conference.

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