From Watching to Choosing: A Design Science Account of UD (Understanding Duo)- a Branching-Narrative Animated Curriculum for Social Skills Learning in Autistic Children

Abstract

Animated instruction and social narratives are both widely used to teach social skills to autistic children, and both are, in their conventional forms, things a child watches or is read to. The child’s role is receptive. This paper reports the design of UD (Understanding Duo), an animated social skills curriculum in which each episode is instead structured as a decision tree: the child is asked what the character should do next, chooses among three options, and sees that choice play out. We follow the design science research (DSR) paradigm and use the six-activity process model of Peffers and colleagues to structure the account. The designed artefact comprises a curriculum specification of 140 episodes across seven skill levels — foundational social skills, emotional understanding, daily living, school, community, friendship and safety — together with full screenplays, choice architectures and adult support material for each episode. From the design work we abstract seven design principles, formulated using the aim–context–mechanism schema proposed by Gregor, Chandra Kruse and Seidel. The most consequential is a non-punitive branching rule: no choice offered to the child leads to ridicule, failure or an unrecoverable outcome, and consequences differ in usefulness rather than in valence. We situate the contribution in the improvement quadrant of the DSR knowledge contribution framework: the problem — teaching social skills in a way that transfers — is well established; the solution, treating the episode as a navigable decision space rather than a linear text, is not. The paper reports design and demonstration only; no empirical evaluation is claimed.