Abstract

Autistic children face diverse social challenges that significantly impact their overall quality of life. Role play is one of the commonly adopted approaches that practitioners used to improve their perspective-taking abilities in social activities and behavioral interventions. Since autistic children exhibit a diverse range of learning interests and motivations, practitioners usually adopt a personalized social story contexts for the role play experiences. Therefore, we present GenRole, a generative AI system aimed at creating personalized role-play story scripts and visual scenes in social stories. We developed three modes in a projector-based application to support repeated practice and reinforcement of social skills. Through experiments and interviews with 17 teachers and parents, we collected valuable data, demonstrating GenRole's potential and effectiveness. This research offers insights for future HCI work addressing the personalization and immersion challenges in social skills education for autistic children.