StoryToy the Interactive Storytelling Toy

Children are drawn away from traditional toys and towards computer games at an ever younger age. Pervasive Computing may reverse that trend as it can bring similar levels of interactivity as available in computer games to traditional toys. In this a paper a storytelling environment is presented consisting of an audio replay engine and a tactile user interface based on a sensor network. The implemented user interface has the form of a farm made out of cloth with stuffed animals as actors. Around the farm and inside the animals are wireless sensor pods that transmit the manipulations of the characters to the replay engine. Several stories and games with differing levels of complexity were created and tested on children of ages between two and six. This demonstrated that with audio feedback alone one can already offer an equally enjoyable level of interactivity as provided by computer and console games. It also showed that with a 'roadmap' of complexity, the same platform can grow with the child.