TEATRIX: Virtual Environment for Story Creation

This paper describes TEATRIX; a learning environment designed to help children, and their teachers, in the whole process of collaborative story creation. TEATRIX provides an environment where both drama and story creation are merged into one medium providing a form of collaborative makebelieve for children. While creating a story TEATRIX allows the children to interact with each other in a distributed 3D environment, by means of their chosen characters. Each character is an intelligent software agent living in the world of the story: the theatre stage. Characters that are not controlled by children act autonomously according to the actions and goals set up by their role in the story. The roles in the story are based on the work by Vladimir Propp on folk tales and can be chosen from a set that includes a villain, a hero, a princess, a helper, etc. Children not only set up the scene for the development of the play and its characters, but also do the whole performance. TEATRIX is being evaluated in a Computer Integrated Classroom (CiC) environment which is part of an EU funded project (the NIMIS project).