Once upon a time

Education and learning have witnessed some important changes in the past few years. The appearance and success of the information society may well be one of the main factors for such change. Indeed. children are increasingly more and more at ease with the use of computers and technology. So, eapitalising on this advantage, our research aims at exploring and enriching current and new classroom activities with the use of technology. In particular, we are focusing in areas such as story telling and dramatic games for children aged 4 to 8. Our goal is to provide an integrated computer environment for collaborative story creation and acting. With such environment we intend to provide effective support for children developing: ̄ their notions of narrative, through the dramatisation of several situations, and; ̄ their ability to take a 2nd and 3rd person perspective across the experience of a wide range of situations. Children will create their own stories using sets of predefined scenarios and characters. By negotiation, they choose their "adopted" characters and act in a playlike situation. Children will be connected through a networked environment, and use fairly intuitive interfaces (use of LCD-tablets and light-pens, touch sensitive board and finger print recognition devices will be used). This project is part of the NIMIS project, i3-ESE. EU funded initiative under the ESPRIT prograxn. Narrative and Story Creation The concept of narrative is presented to pupils at an early stage of their development through stories, fairy tales, films, tv, or through their understanding of life experiences. From Plowman’s point of view (Plowman 1996)~ the role of narrative is not simply aesthetic, but it is central to our cognition since earliest childhood. Documentation from Psychology suggests that stories can be very important in human cognition because they can register each one’s personal experience and can also be a vehicle to exchange experience with others (Dautenhahn & Nehaniv 1998). Furthermore, teachers make use of narrative structures during their learning sessions in order to engage learners in a more motivational way. The learners, themselves, also use narrative structures to exchange and comnmnicate their own experiences with each other (usually when telling the other about some situation that happened). Narrative structure was thoroughly studied and investigated by Russian Structuralists, and specially by Vladimir Propp (Propp 1968), who analysed one hundred of Russian fairy tales and established a set of 31 functions that compose the structure of a story. This definition makes it possible to study a story by means of the functions performed by the characters. These functions can be understood as both the actions of the characters and the consequences of these actions in the story. Moreover, and in Berger’s opinion (Berger 1997), the structure established by Propp can be applied to modern narratives (of all genres) as well. Designing an Interactive Environment for Collaborative Story Creation By exploring the potential value of narrative, we aim at building a collaborative story creation environment. Such environment will allow children to create and act in stories. Moreover, we expect to use such characters in a mixed-control situation whereby children cau control the characters, or the characters themselves act autonomously in the story. Indeed, we expect that such environment will deal with the pedagogical goals of the acquisition of notions of narrative and the ability to take 2nd and 3rd person perspectives. A Story Creation Experience The first step in the development of such environment was to experience and to gather information from story creation situations in real classrooms, with children of these targeted ages. We wanted to ~’ound our research in the current activities and practices happening in 115 From: AAAI Technical Report FS-99-01. Compilation copyright © 1999, AAAI (www.aaai.org). All rights reserved. schools. In this experience, we analysed what happened during the story creation process to answer the following questions: 1. How does tile theme for tile story arise? 2. How do children choose their characters? 3. What hat)t)ens before the beginning of the acting"telling"? 4. What do children do to act "in character"? 5. How much scaffolding do children need to create a story? 6. What is the role of the teacher during acting? 7. What are the differences/particularities encountered throughout the age range (from 4 to 8 years old)? To obtain some answers to these questions., we performed some experiences in a Portuguese school. The school is located in a suburban area of Lisbon, covering an extremely poor neighborhood. The school follows a pedagogical approach that allows children to explore daily different thematic rooms: the intellectual room, the dramatic room and the artistic room. The experiences took place in the "dramatic room", which main activity is the dramatisation of different situations/stories. Two experiences were performed over two groups of children: 4 to 5 years old; and 7 to 8 years old. The first experience occurred in a theatrical setting, the other was based on a puppet:s performance. The experiences were filmed to better retain its aspects and details. The Story Creation Experience Results After the experiences, we analysed the videos to get some of the answers to our initial questions. Children behaved very freely and spontaneous during the acting of the story, even as they were filmed on tape. ̄ The choice of the story theme Before starting to act. children sat around the teacher and discussed which story they wanted to perform. During this choice, the teacher acted as a moderator. From the teacher testimony, they usually choose from a known set of fairy tales, from books they read together, or from situations of daily life (example: a shopping trip note that children live in a city area). ̄ The choice of the characters The task of choosing each character was done collaboratively between all children, although the teacher’s mediation was often needed (especially when the younger ones became upset and cried when they could not be the heroes of the story). Besides choosing his/her chm’acters, children also dressed up (in the theatrical stage only) to better incarnate the characters: personalities.