Narratives are ubiquitous. Some argue that the fundamental element in life is the story and storytelling can be viewed as a framework for almost all communication. In education, some would also promote that storytelling be acknowledged as fundamental to learning. Within the recently launched I3 ESE framework, there are a number of projects that have a focus on storytelling. Within these projects storytelling is introduced at many different levels. For example, storytelling is used for learning, for collaboration, for creative exploration, for sharing, and for participatory design. As these projects develop, they can benefit from an inter-project awareness, focus and sharing of approach, current work and plans. The workshop offers an interactive forum where the different I3 members have a chance to present and work out these ideas of narrative with interested colleagues. The workshop consists primarily of presentations from ESE projects and will be followed at the end of the day with a workshop discussion session. Workshop participation from members in the greater I3 community is also encouraged.

Subgroups and Panel sessions

* Narrative structure and tools

* Storytelling as Learning

* Supporting collaboration

* The Role of Children in Research

The sub group discussions will last approximately 40 minutes. Each group will be asked to nominate a spokesperson. The feedback session will allow 5 minutes per group for presentation of their ideas and a couple of minutes question time. We hope that this approach will enable fruitful discussion and build relations between project groups.

Workshop organizers: Kristian Simsarian Allison Druin Danaë Stanton - KidStory
 
 

Storytelling and discovery

Tools for storytelling by playing with virtual Puppets

As other projects, PUPPET covers multiple backgrounds for developing new tools for Early Learning. This contribution represents at least some engineers' interpretation of a design basis after a few months of interdisciplinary and educational consortium collaboration.

The VPT is seen as a system of tools enabling children to tell stories by playing around with VPs in a virtual scenery in various ways, anchored in a puppet theatre metaphor. Thus storytelling is realised by children producing and/or playing puppet theatre pieces.

At one extreme a piece emerges as a simple recording of a child's spontaneous play and interaction with VPs in the virtual scenery on-line and in real time, with the child "embodied" in the virtual domain through an avatar much alike the other VPs.

At the other extreme a piece results from a "playwriter phase", which conveys the desired story content through carefully planning of the VPs' doings. Thus, the piece is scripted to direct all the VPs acting.

The suggested VPT builds on three core notions:

Firstly, the "stage", i.e., the scenery where the story takes place, is a visualised virtual 3D world presented to the child on a computer screen. This may or may not be using 3D stereo projection to enforce the child's feeling of being immersed "on stage".

Secondly, the "stage" is inhabited by VPs as "virtually alive" characters, e.g., humans, animals, or creatures of fantasy. The property "alive" means that VPs may have the ability to move and act/react by themselves, without direct manipulations from the child, as opposed to "real" puppets. Technically the VPs are implemented as fully autonomous agents. The property of "fully autonomous" refers to the possession of an own set of (modelled) intentions and goals as well as virtual senses, driving the agent to decide on and do actions, interactions and moves. Which degree of autonomy actually comes to play in a given context depends upon how close in detail the child scripts the actions and moves for each individual VP in the piece in question.

Thirdly, for balance of control of the play between the child and the system, we aim to support the full range with complete child control at one end and complete system control at the other. We consider this flexibility very valuable for the story telling tool as it allows for adapting to the individual child's abilities, as well as it may provide the tool with more descriptive power. The current approach to achieve this flexibility is to adopt a four-level hierarchical model for VP control by scripting. The four scripting levels are labelled: motor, task, motivation, and environment. Scripting a VP's doings at a certain level means overruling corresponding parts of the VP's potential autonomy.

Having talked about small play pieces we also aim at an editing tool, which should allow for editing such pieces into larger plays. These pieces large or small may be replayed using all the degrees of freedom that a recorded dynamic 3D world provides for presentation for the child and/or an audience.

To illustrate the hierarchical scripting model, an example of how a concrete scene might be scripted at each of the four levels will be given. Also we will present ideas on the interface for the child for the scripting/playwriter phase.

Tools to support collaborative storytelling

The narrative focus in KidStory is to go beyond the scripted interactive book-style narrative and allow children to create shared stories and storytelling experiences together. We are building two storytelling platforms with a strategy that the two approaches compliment one another, both in their approach to narrative and in their mode of human computer interaction. The first is a zoomable desktop drawing program with a tools-based interaction metaphor and a 'scene-based' narrative presentation. The second is a 3D shared virtual environment which is based on gesture and mode interaction and is inspired by more improvisational forms of storytelling.

The first platform, KidPad, is a 2D zooming interfaces that enables child users to draw on a canvas, zoom in space, and link locations. The drawing tools, crayons and an eraser, enable the creation of the objects, settings, and characters of the stories. Another tool, the magic wand, enables different locations in space and scale to be linked, creating the story structure. This system enables children to collaboratively author stories on a scale space drawing pad.

The second platform is more experimental and is based on the DIVE (Distributed interactive virtual Environments) system. This system enables the creation of 3D objects within the context of collaborative virtual environments. We are working on methods and mechanisms that promote collaborative exploration and creative play and the creation of novel methods for providing time structuring within the 3D environment (e.g. cinematic, theater, or other form of spatial and temporal linking). This includes 3D objects that provide intuitive and everyday affordances for story creation and retelling. Some of the storytelling inspirations for these objects and mechanism come from 'story quilts', puppetry, campfires, etc.

The two systems are being developed in parallel and benefit from 'cross-pollination' and iterative development with our child and teacher partners in the schools.
 

A design perspective on narrative structures for the Pogo world

Pogo will appear to the child as an environment containing different elements: the Pogo World, the collaborative virtual environment inhabited by characters and props.

The Pogo Characters: characters (animals, puppets, persons, fantasy creatures, etc.), that are the protagonists in the stories created in the Pogo World.

The Pogo Props: active or passive objects that decorate the Pogo World.

The Pogo Tools: physical interfaces that allow individual and collective access, creation of stories and the building and/or editing of Pogo elements.

The (virtual) Pogo World will result from an 'assemblage' of narratives, created by children. The stories that children will build, share and collaborate in the Pogo environment will include aspects from different narrative models (e.g. film, games, etc.).

In a recent workshop with the design partners that are involved in the Pogo project (Cryo Networks, Ravensburger, Domus Academy and Philips Design), four possible 'models' for the Pogo environment were discussed. These 'models', described in the following section, present an indication for the 'story bandwidth' of the pogo world. These models describe Pogo as:

A playground. In this model, the child plays in a physical environment which contains physical objects. Stories are eventually created by the child re-telling his or her play. The story world is characterised as inspirational, it contains no rules or role descriptions.

A story puzzle. In this model, the child reads and assembles parts of stories in a structured story world. The child's creative process is that of reading and constructing. The resulting narratives are highly structured. The story world contains pre-defined characters, environments and story threads.

Role playing. In this model, the creation process of the child is to re-enact drama. Stories are created by the child re-telling the role playing. The story world contains rules/roles and behaviours (e.g. children role playing cowboy and Indian).

A story chain letter. In this model, the narrative creation process is by group conversation. Stories are shared by a group of children interacting in story sharing. The story world is characterised by collaboration.

Today's Stories: stimulating reflections

Visualising stories

Pogo, one of the ESE projects, addresses story-building as a key concept to drive technology development: a virtual and real environment where children create, explore and develop language and social skills. The design process of the project is basically informed by field studies at primary schools. Findings will afterwards be used to elaborate design concepts of the Pogo environment.

The data presented were collected in an Italian primary school, one of the experimental sites of Pogo, where narratives are extensively used. If we would draw a (not exhaustive) map of the different use of narratives at school (see figure above), we could represent it as a net where elements can be combined on purpose to support different teaching strategies.

The essence of these different uses of narratives is that they are always "contextualised" by the children, who fill in the space that each story leaves to imagination, in a very personal way. The first data seem to suggest that there is not a pre-defined grammar for stories: story-building is a sort of "situated activity" where not defined elements are completed and made meaningful by the reader. A simple gesture, an unexpected noise during the narration, are often sufficient for children to deviate from the main course of action and suggest new happenings. The thread of discourse is sometime lost but the enjoyment is sure.

Learning through storytelling: the mediating role of puppets, props and people

· puppets - providing children with hand held puppets facilitates storytelling, whereas it can hinder it if they are given separate plastic figures.

· props - children will use magical props to bridge stories when they get stuck rather than trying to work out how to move onto the next stage of a story.

· people - we have found that audiences can facilitate story development but can also lead to distraction.

In our presentation we shall present a number of these examples, explaining them in terms of developmental theory. We shall also discuss their implications for supporting learning through narrative construction through the use of a virtual puppet theatre.
 

Children as design and storytelling partners

In our presentation, we will discuss the critical role of children as research collaborators and inventors of new storytelling technologies. In addition, we will present the iterative design process we use to partner with children. "Cooperative Inquiry" is an approach to research that includes: (1) a multidisciplinary partnership with children; (2) field research that emphasises understanding context, activities, and artefacts; and (3) iterative low-tech and high-tech prototyping. During our presentation, we will discuss this technology research and design process, as well as present initial findings of the project thus far.

Cooperative inquiry techniques have been used by our project team in both English and Swedish school settings. We will present an example of this research process from our work in one Nottingham school. In an early participatory design session, children were asked to "invent something to help them tell stories." A class brainstorming session familiarised children with a number of different storytelling techniques. Low-tech prototyping was then carried out by groups of adult researchers and child inventors who then presented their ideas. The information from the presentations and artefacts were then analysed and used to inform the technology design process. Changes and new developments in technology are being implemented today that reflect this gathering and analysis of ideas.

Although both Swedish and English partners will maintain common educational research goals, the paths to those goals may differ due to differences such as teaching methods, class structure and ideologies concerning assessment. The effect of the process on children's collaborative, storytelling and communication skills will be regularly examined.
 
 
 
 

Narratives at schools : preliminary results from field research

In the context of the POGO project, investigations on sites are taking place at the Hamaide elementary school and preschool. The Hamaide school is characterized by an active pedagogical orientation. One of the features of this active pedagogy is the use of narratives as a vehicle for different learning such as development of language abilities, creativity, self-expression, but also mathematics, geographical notions.

Narratives at Hamaide school rely on diverse aspects: imagining, illustrating, dictating to adult, writing, telling and sharing stories. Within the curriculum different narrative activities are integrated and proposed to the children. Those activities are either collective class activities (e.g., book fancy fair, painting story board, theater play...) or individual (personal story writing book); specific by ages, or vertical workshops for 5 to 8 years old children.

Several artefacts (such as, for 6 years old, observation books, story book, rough book, wall panels, document illustrating a theme) and "tools" (emotions, sensorial modality, drawings, cards, a story to complete) are supporting and stimulating children's narratives

Our approach consists in integrating the literature analysis (with a comparison of different theoretical approaches), and the field analysis. The field analysis is based on observations in classroom, video-based analysis, teachers practices analysis, and elicitation interviews.

On a regular basis, teachers are invited to discuss a theme using concrete examples based on their experiences. One of these thematic discussions was "According to your own experience, how do you recognize a "good" story?"

The results from the teacher practices analysis are the definition of criterion peculiar to the teachers according to their practices or intentions. Criterion obtained were the following:

Imagination and emotions contained in the story, catch the attention of the reader/listener, contains a message-personal (child choosing the means to express his/her personality), personal dimension , generate emotions, thematic (which differs with the age of children), illustrations (contributing to the imagery dimensions and from which the story is issued), intentions (the story should fit the teller intentions), presentation and sharing dimensions (should be taking into account).

The criterion mentioned above are related to the content dimensions of the stories, teachers also gave criterion that were linked with the "well structured" feature of the stories. On this point, the teachers were expressing different points of view. Some of them consider structure as important as narratives are view as a mean to respond to pedagogical concern like learning reading and writing ; while others were arguing that their priority is to lead children through stories to the expression of their own selves, emotions and imaginations.

Teachers perceive different sides of their roles in the process of the story creation (e.g., provide to children several means and tools to support them in their narrative intentions, conduct, encourage through questioning, help children in the narrative building). While discussing their practice teachers raised several questions related to the personal and emotional dimensions of the story such as "how to adequately answer to emotions generated by the activity? What is, in this case, the teacher's role?"

During the oral presentation, the "slice of life" activity will be presented. This activity took place in two classes and shows differences between them in the practice: sequences of activity, interactions teacher-child, teacher's intentions... Pattern of activity describing the "slice of life" activity process will be presented, as well as others activities illustrating that the creative process can also be collective (e.g., painting story board, building a theater play, collective narratives activities in kindergarten class).
 
 

Pogo: a living, learning environment

We propose that new media can provide the means for augmenting children's fantasy world. By creation of an enriched language, where text is just one part of a full spectrum of multimedia expressive elements, we will support children in exploring and developing language skills in a multimedia virtual living world called Pogo. Favourite characters or props will be moved from the virtual environment into 'real world' embodiment as intelligent active toys and devices that can 'talk', move, be squeezed and manipulated as a means of interfacing to the virtual story-world via a richer, multi-modal interaction metaphor. In this way, the final realisation of Pogo will be an augmented, living, learning environment that provides feedback to the child, the teacher and the parents. In this project we wish to support children, teachers and parents with a collaborative virtual story world called Pogo. By providing a language and environment for the expression of fantasy, role-playing, representation and pretence, Pogo aims to be instrumental in supporting the children in the development of their ability of self-expression and creativity. More over, Pogo aims to support children in their capacity of sharing stories and their collaboration process in story building. The development of narrative as a vehicle of exchange between cultures is seen as equally important.

Pogo objectives:

- To understand children and active learning. To understand stories, story- telling and story-building and on the basis of this understanding, to create a living, learning world in which children can build their own stories.

- To embody new interaction paradigms in new tools. We will develop interaction paradigms in which multi-sensorial interactive devices provide children with a new means of engaging in the virtual story world of Pogo. We will create new tools which enhance learning through story telling, support story creation and allow highly sensorial interaction.

- To develop enabling technologies. We will develop a network communication infrastructure and the mechanisms to mix and synchronise 3D graphical objects with natural audio and video streams and build a functional prototype system through which the virtual Pogo environment and its new tools can be validated.

KidStory - Developing Collaborative Storytelling Environments for Children, with Children

· KidStory works with children, educators, and researchers from various disciplines in the development process by building an interdisciplinary, intergenerational, international design team.

· KidStory develops technologies, extending currently available techniques to support inherently social learning experiences while concurrently exploring novel approaches that can be used in the learning environments of tomorrow.

· KidStory assesses the impact of these new technologies in how they promote change in learning outcomes and how these new technologies change teaching practices and classroom structures.

The research process not only includes technology design, development, and testing but also classroom integration and support. Applications will be built and installed in locations where they can be used by children within their context. We believe it is essential that practical educators and the children themselves collaborate in the design process as much as computer scientists and educational researchers. The iterative design process is composed of three key elements: contextual inquiry, technology immersion, and participatory design.

KidStory involves three phases of technological development, each of which extends the interface further away from traditional computer hardware towards more kid-friendly and inherently collaborative forms of interaction. The three technologies are: the shared spatial desktop computer, where multiple input devices enable new forms of sharing; shared storytelling objects, where both physical and virtual objects can be manipulated as part of storytelling; and shared augmented spaces, where movement and gesture within physical space forms the basis of interaction with such objects.

Evaluation methods including surveys, observational instruments, and portfolio coding, will offer a rich archive of change over time. In addition, these assessment methods will offer snapshots of information useful in the on-going technology development efforts.

KidStory combines recognised talent with proven task records in Computer Science, Education, Psychology and in developing technologies through iterative participatory design processes. The partners are The University of Nottingham (UK), The Royal Institute of technology (Sweden) and The Swedish Institute of Computer Science (Sweden). KidStory also involves researchers from the University of Maryland (USA).
 
 

The Educational Puppet Theatre of Virtual Worlds

The results of the project will be to:
(a) promote new forms of creativity made possible by new IT tools;

(b) enable new forms of self expression not possible with conventional plays;

(c) encourage learning to learn and

(d) allow for a new form of computer-literacy.

The project intends to develop a virtual puppet theatre (VPT) for:

(1) a single young puppeteer (age 4 to 5) in realistic settings,

(2) a single older puppeteer (age 6 to 8) in settings that encourage symbolic activities, and

(3) multiple puppeteers in settings encouraging collaborative interactions.

In the first phase we are analysing drama and playwriting for children and carrying out a series of exploratory and empirical studies to determine current play practices - especially when using imaginary and physical puppets and props - in order to establish reference and support for the design of the VPTs. We are involving children, teachers and others in co-designing the prototypes of our interactive worlds (VPTs) and their appropriate interfaces, by using a range of innovative low-tech and mid-tech prototyping methods called "informant design".

In the second phase, we will develop and implement the VPTs as full Virtual Reality Environments with the use of avatars, autonomous agents/puppets and "magical" animations. The third phase evaluates the Early Learning benefits of the developed "Virtual Puppet Theatres" through school tests.

Today's Stories

Today's Stories develops an approach to learning for young children (4 to 8) that is aimed at the development of social, communicative and emotional skills in the context of their everyday activities. The underlying idea is, first, that children may learn from reflecting on their actions and, second, that children may learn from other children's perspectives on their own actions. Although this does not require technology per se, we choose to develop and experiment with tools to facilitate it. One technological objective of the project is to develop a wearable device, called the KidsCam, that can capture short sequences of interest in the child's daytime. This can be done on demand, giving the tool a broad educational use. But the KidsCam will also spontaneously retain an episode that leads up to an interesting event. Considering a single device, this provides a fragmented history of the day of a child, as seen from its own perspective. The crucial insight, however, is that the histories as taken from the perspectives of different children, are interrelated. An event of fight, anger or joy typically involves multiple children. It can be arranged, therefore, that such an event be recorded from the different perspectives of those involved or others (adults or children).

Children only slowly build up a capacity of reflection. The mere replay of their behaviour is not sufficient to lead to reflection. In our approach the intertwined day's histories, highlighting 'major' events from different points of view, constitute the raw material for a subsequent reflective dialogue involving children, educators and/or parents. They annotate it with their record of what they see, think, experience, and augment it with expressive media, symbols (e.g., stylised faces to express various emotional states), or sound-effects (e.g., special effects to highlight for example surprise or fear). The resulting multi-medial document captures a tiny 'lesson in living'. It could be kept as a memory, a document for future reference, or as a creative production (like the first paintings that children make). The challenge of Today's Stories is to create a diary document that, even though rooted in an original and personal episode, acquires by a series of editing, annotation and multi-medial augmentation a detached, cartoon-like status. This document is subsequently used to relate to as if from a fresh perspective.

From an educational point of view our working hypothesis is that a fundamental redefinition of education, which we call "Autonomy Oriented Education", can be built around the notions of autonomy, morality and a sense of belonging. What starts out as a playful process of creativity, based on the material collected during the day, is biased by didactic principles that, within this general framework, aim at specific learning objectives. Thus, a quarrel with a friend can lead to an attempt to understanding the common meaning of "fight" and "friend", to understanding the anger leading to the quarrel, or to understanding the meaning one attributes to "friendships". It may lead to examine one's aim and the question of whether the quarrel was the best way to achieve it, or to the examination of the quarrel in light of the pain it caused. If interested and adequate, the children will be able to use external material to support a variety of learning objectives, including the transition to literacy.

The results of Today's Stories are developed and applied within two school environments, in Israel and in Denmark. Exploiting the significant differences between both settings, the project pays attention to social, cultural and ethical implications, as well as to the conditions for acceptance and success of deploying its technology.

The extreme versatility of the tools and results is one of the most compelling factors of the project. The technology could facilitate the discovery of novel forms of education that contribute to social skills, literacy, communication, cross-cultural understanding and highly appreciated and productive home-school relationships. Our results have the potential of becoming the augmented pencil and paper of the future, tools that retain a natural relevance as a child grows and develops.
 
 
 
 

Workshop Participants

Steve Benford, KidStory
CompSci, Nottingham U
sdb@Cs.Nott.AC.UK

Angela Boltman, KidStory
KTH, CID/UMD
aboltman@umiacs.umd.edu

John Bowers, eRENA
KTH, CID
bowers@nada.kth.se

Mimo Caenepeel
Editor of i3magazine
mimo@cogsci.ed.ac.uk

Francoise Decortis, Pogo
FNRS University of Liege,
francoise.decortis@ulg.ac.be

Allison Druin, KidStory
KTH, CID/UMD
allisond@umiacs.umd.edu

Lennart Fahlén, eSCAPE
Swedish Inst. of Computer Sci.
lef@sics.se

Carina Fast, KidStory
Uppsala/KTH
carina.fast@ilu.uu.se

Rich Gold
Xerox PARC, RED
richgold@parc.xerox.com

Erik Granum, Puppet
U. Aalborg
eg@vision.auc.dk

Mark Hartevelt, Pogo
Philips Design
m.hartevelt@design.philips.com

Marita Kjellin, KidStory
Uppsala/SICS
marita.kjellin@ilu.uu.se

Martin Klesen, PUPPET
DFKI GmbH
klesen@dfki.de

John Knight, Fabula Project
University of Brighton
john.Knight@bton.ac.uk
Pär Hansson, KidStory
Swedish Inst. of Computer Sci.
par@sics.se

Claus B. Madsen, Puppet
U. Aalborg
cbm@vision.auc.dk
 

Patrizia Marti, Pogo
University of Siena,
marti@media.unisi.it

Nathalie Mathé
Directrice Ville Numérisée
MATHENa@district-parthenay.fr

Rod McCall,
Napier University, Edinburgh
r.mccall@dcs.napier.ac.uk

Claudio Moderini, Pogo
Domus Academy
moderini@domac.it

Lennart Mogren Playground
Uppsala University
lennart.mogren@mailbox.swipnet.se

Karin Munk, PUPPET
U. Aalborg
khm@vision.auc.dk

Helen Neale, KidStory
VIRART, Nottingham U.
epxhn@epn2.maneng.nottingham.ac.uk

Per Persson, Persona
Humle Lab, SICS
perp@sics.se

Daniela Petrelli, Hips
ITC-IRST
petrelli@irst.itc.it

Luca Petroni, Pogo
University of Siena,
petroni@media.unisi.it

Pentti Pirhonen
University of Jyväskylä.
pentti.pirhonen@jamsa.fi

Kris Popat, eTui
Ultra Lab
Kris@ultralab.anglia.ac.uk

Antonio Rizzo, Pogo
University of Siena
rizzo@media.unisi.it

Yvonne Rogers, Puppet
COGS, Sussex
yvonner@cogs.susx.ac.uk

Job Rutgers, Pogo
Philips Design
J.Rutgers@design.philips.com

Berthe Saudelli, Pogo
University of Siena
saudelli@media.unisi.it

Mike Scaife, PUPPET
COGS, Sussex
mikesc@cogs.susx.ac.uk

Phoebe Sengers, eRENA
ZKM, Karlsruhe
phoebe@zkm.de

Kristian Simsarian, KidStory
Swedish Inst. of Computer Sci.
kristian@sics.se

Danaë Stanton, KidStory
Psychology, Nottingham U.
des@psychology.nottingham.ac.uk

Yngve Sundblad, KidStory
KTH, CID
yngve@nada.kth.se

Marco Susani, Pogo
Domus Academy
susani@domac.it

Walter Van de Velde, Stories
Starlab Research Laboratories
wvdv@starlab.net