Performative Authoring: Nurturing Storytelling in Children through Imaginative Enactment

This paper presents an empirical study that provides support for the use of enactment in storytelling systems. The overall goal of our research is to facilitate the authoring of stories by children, aged 8 to 10 years. Our findings show that story enactment results in positive effects on the child‘s storytelling, but only through the mediation of imagination during enactment. Only imaginative enactments support better storytelling. Based on our results, we make a case for enactment as an effective motivator, interface and cognitive tool for children going through a period of development called the Fourth-grade Slump, and we propose the concept of performative authoring for the design of interactive storytelling systems for children.