Hyperstories and Social Interaction in 2D and 3D Edutainment - I3Lab

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Hyperstories and Social Interaction in 2D and 3D Edutainment Spaces for Children Franca Garzotto and Matteo Forfori HOC-Hypermedia Open Center Department of Electronics and Information, Politecnico of Milano P. zza L. da Vinci, 32 – 20133-. Milano – Italy

[email protected], [email protected]

was central to society long before humans learned to write. “Millions of anonymous raconteurs invented narrative… when they discovered how to turn their knowledge into tales they could pass on to others.” [28] But storytelling is not only one of the oldest known human activities.

ABSTRACT This paper presents FaTe2, an edutainment environment for children that combines a variety of paradigms: storytelling, hypertext, games, collaborative learning, and social interaction. FaTe2 provides a web based, multi-user, multi-dimension hyperspace, where children (aged 8-11) can meet, chat, play, and perform storytelling activities in collaboration. Small groups of kids – working both shoulder to shoulder and remotely - can explore together multimedia interactive stories rendered by means of 2D and 3D scenes; they can perform a variety of educational games and narrative activities; they can personalize scene elements and collaboratively create their own narrative flows, generating a multidimensional (i.e., 2D and 3D) hyperstory from the linear multimedia stories that are built-in in the system. The paper describes the background of FaTe2, its “child-centered” design (informed by field studies on kids’ storytelling), and its implementation approach. We finally discuss how kids represent a challenging “category of target users” who may open new perspectives for hypertext practice and research.

Narrative structures are the first ones that children acquire and use to construct meaning and impose order on their experience [10], and storytelling has an educational dimension, especially for young kids. There is abundant evidence, from the psychological and pedagogical literature, that listening, telling, and reflecting on stories promote the development of a wide spectrum of cognitive functions and skills: expression, communication, recognition, recall, interpretation, analysis and synthesis [4, 10, 41]. Storytelling has also an entertainment dimension. Stories and games have an intrinsic duality, and a number of underlying commonalities, as suggested by many studies on traditional and computer based games [7, 14, 37]. From a cognitive perspective they both involve a similar set of mental skills: focus – the ability to focus attention on what is most interesting at a given moment), empathy - the ability to (consciously or unconsciously) put oneself in the place of another one, and imagination - the ability to visualize alternative realities. Still, only after the theories on education by the philosopher John Locke’s in late 1600, story books experimented some forms of edutainment, and storytelling slowly moved towards entertainment as well as education - a means for enjoyable, active, self-directed learning [28].

Categories and Subject Descriptors K3.1 [Computers and Education]: Computers Use in Education – Collaborative Learning; H5.4 [Hypertext/ Hypermedia] User Issues; I3.6 [Computer Graphics] Methodology and techniques - Interaction Techniques

General Terms

Finally, storytelling has also a social dimension. Since its origin (think of epic poems, for example), storytelling has had a collaborative and community building function, to share beliefs and transmitted values, and to pass down culture across generations. Several forms of kids’ storytelling involve collaboration, and many games (e.g., pretend play or fantasy play) are kinds of co-produced storytelling, where children share out the character roles, or take turns being the narrator.

Design, Human Factors

Keywords Collaborative Storytelling, Hypernarrative, IDC (Interaction Design and Children), Edutainment, Social Interaction, Story Grammar

1. INTRODUCTION AND BACKGROUND Storytelling goes back as far as time allows us to remember, and

The advent of hypertext and interactive multimedia had an impact on storytelling from several perspectives. Hypertext ability to encompass non-linear stories that include interactive exploration and discovery promoted new kinds of narrative (e.g., hyperfiction) and new literary theories [1, 11, 23, 25, 29,31,40]. Combined with interactive multimedia, hypertext push the entertainment dimensions of storytelling even further, offering more interactive opportunities that “make things

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Israel in Jerusalem (“SEE – Shrine Educational Experience Project” [16]). In 2005, Learning@Europe was evaluated during massive on-field tests that involved over 1500 students, proving a very high educational effectiveness [16]. This successful experience gave us a deep understanding of the general paradigms of web based cooperation and of edutainment, and stimulated us to extend FaTe interactive tales with collaboration and 3D interaction. In addition, the implementation platform of Learning@Europe (WebTalkII) provided the kernel software environment for FaTe2.

happen” and fostering the discovery dimensions that engage and entertain the reader. In this paper, we discuss an edutainment environment for young children that combines all the above concepts. The general goals of our project are: •

to exploit the paradigms of hypertext, interactive multimedia, and interactive games to promote “active” learning [14] of narrative and communication skills for kids aged 8-11, and to expose them to ICT technology in a playful way.



to provide a social interaction space for kids to collaborate in edutaiment narrative activities. There is abundant evidence, from the pedagogical literature, about the social basis of learning [41], and about the fact that performing educational learning activities in small groups not only promotes collaboration attitudes and skills but also fosters learning [41,42] Social contexts give children the opportunity to successfully carry out more complex skills than they could execute alone. Performing a task with others provides an opportunity not only to imitate what others are doing, but also to discuss the task and make thinking visible. In addition, social needs often drive a child’s reason for learning. Since a child’s social identity is enhanced by participating in a community or a group, involving children in a social intellectual activity can be a powerful motivator and can lead to better learning than relying on individual work. Finally, within storytelling activities, peers’ story and imaginative creations serve as new suggestions for children to enact and tell their stories creatively in a dramatic frame. It appears to be the “collective” routines among peers that take children imagination and improvisational creativity even further [38].

The rest of the paper is organized as follows. Section 2 introduces our child-centered design approach. Section 3 describes the children activities in FaTe2. Section 4 discusses the “experience design” of the project from a more holistic perspective. Section 5 briefly sketches the implementation architecture. Section 6 draws the conclusion, discussing how kids may represent a challenging “category of target users” and may open new perspectives for hypertext practice and research.

2. CHILD-CENTERED DESIGN “Understanding the target audience” is foremost to the success of any interactive system [24]. In FaTe2, this was achieved through a combination of contextual inquiry and focus groups. Our study was carried out between January and December 2005 at an elementary school in Milano, involving four classes of kids aged 7-9, for a total of one hundred and five children and eight teachers [20]. For each class, we organized four videotaped sessions of kids’ behavior observation, each one lasting for approximately 90 minutes. In the first two sessions kids, organized in small groups, used FaTe interactive tales in the computer lab (Figures 1 and 2). In the third session, in the classroom, children created their own stories as “variants” of FaTe interactive tales seen in the computer lab. They worked again in group, using traditional tools (paper, colour crayons, pencils). In the fourth session, in the computer lab, kids translated the tale created in the classroom into an interactive multimedia story. They used a simple authoring tool that we built for the purpose of our study, which supports the creation of a sequence of multimedia scenes. Three focus groups with teachers were carried on before, during, and after the observation sessions. We investigated the storytelling methods they normally adopt in the classroom, we critically discuss the kids’ observed behaviour, and possible requirements for computer mediated cooperative storytelling. This study helped us to understand the methods and practices adopted in schools to promote narrative skills in young children; the behaviors of kids during “traditional” (i.e., non computer-mediated) storytelling processes; the behavior of kids during computer mediated storylistening and story-telling; the patterns of kid’s collaboration during these activities; the role of teachers in all the above activities, and the degree of scaffolding needed. These results informed the design of FaTe2, discussed in the next sections.

Our environment, called FaTe2, provides a web based multiuser space in two and three dimensions, where children can meet, chat, talk, play together, explore multimedia stories and collaborate in a hyper-storytelling process. FaTe2 merges and extends the technical and methodological achievements of preexisting projects: FaTe and Learning@Europe (and its predecessors – SEE and Virtual Leonardo). FaTe (Fairy Tales and Technology) created four interactive multimedia fairy tales for 5-8 year old kids, distributed on CDROMs to elementary schools in over 60 schools in Northern Italy. In a FaTe interactive story, kids can ask the system to read the narrative, navigate across the scenes and interact with story elements, or play simple educational games. Simple authoring features allow children to build their own “story end”, filling it with their own text characters choosen from a predefined set of context elements. Learning@Europe [17] is an educational project funded by the Accenture International Foundation, which involves high school students from 12 European countries. Students meet in a web based 3D virtual world and “learn together” about European History. Learning@Europe exploits an interaction paradigm that we used in previous projects to support collaborative virtual visits of museums – the Science and Technology Museum in Milan (“Virtual Leonardo” project) and the “Shrine of the Book”/Dead Sea Scrolls Pavilion at the National Museum of

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. Figure 3: A 2D scene

Figure 1: FaTe2 field study- kids watching and listening to an interactive tale

A 3D scene is a fantasy world that provides a 3D rendering of the corresponding 2D scene. Entering a 3D scene provides kids with a kind of “immersion” [36] that increases the sense of psychological proximity (a concept of game theory that denotes the extent to which a situation compels users to use empathy and imagination to put themselves into the experience) [33]. A 3D scene is made of the characters, spaces and objects occurring in the 2D scene, and other interactive elements that aim at stretching kids’ imagination and illusion (key factors to make the story situations more compelling, and a means to focus attention on what is educationally more important at a given moment).

Figure 2: FaTe2 field study- Kids discussing the story with the teacher

3. COLLABORATIVE HYPERSTORYTELLING IN FATE2 FaTe2 supports a variety of collaborative activities, in two and three dimensions interaction spaces, which can be grouped in four main categories: exploration, story-building, play, and communication.

3.1 Exploration The narrative hyperspace for exploration comprises a set of built-in interactive fairly tales and the “variants” which kids progressively build using the authoring tool. In this section, we focus on exploration in built-in stories. The construction of hyperstories and their exploration is discussed in the next section.

(a)

A built-in story is composed by a sequence of interactive “scenes”. Each scene has a double representation - in two and three dimensions (see Figures 3 and 4). In a 2D scene, kids can watch the automatic scene animation, read or listen the narrative, manipulate the multimedia characters or objects (triggering movements, music, or dialogues), activate a visual vocabulary, or access the corresponding 3D counterpart. (b) Figure 4 (a-b): A 3D scene Stories are conceived and structured according to a narrative meta-pattern defined by a Story Grammar. The theory of story

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Navigation in a built-in 2D and 3D story follows common hypermedia design patterns [21]: Guided Tour (linear navigation among scenes, either in 2D or in 3D) and Index (direct selection of a scene from either a list of scenes presented in an “entry” page in 2D or an entry “world” in 3D). In 2D, kids can also exploit the Automatic Guided Tour Pattern, which provides automatic forward “play” from a scene to the next one, synchronized with the recorded voice that “reads” the scene text. The links to navigate across the 3D scenes are rendered through the familiar metaphors of “doors” - typical of many stories (see Alice in Wonderland, for example). The kid can “open” a door by moving her avatar sufficiently close to virtually touch it In some case, a “door” looks as a real door, and is visually located on the “borders” of a 3D world; in other cases, it is “an object with door functionality”, like Harry Potter’s “portkeys”, and appears anywhere in a scene.

grammars is originated in the field of linguistics and semiotics from the researches on narrative structures by V. Propp [34], C. Levi-Strauss [26], and C. Bartlett [4]. A story grammar denotes the morphology and syntax of (a category of) stories, defining their typical structural elements and their composition rules. We discovered the use of (paper based) story grammar tools in schools during the field study of the project discussed in the previous section. Several pedagogical researches suggest a story grammar approach helps children to better understand a story and to structure their own narratives, being particularly effective in students who present proficiency problems in communication and writing (e.g., due to cognitive delays, hearing or speech deficits) [15]). In FaTe2, we adopt the simple story grammar currently used in many Italian elementary schools, which is inspired to Stein & Glenn theory [39] and includes the following structural components: initiating event (that sets up a problem); subjective (internal) response (by the protagonist, to the problem); objective (external) response (by the protagonist, to solve the problem); consequence (of the protagonist’s attempt); reaction (a response by the protagonist, to the consequence). A built-in story in FaTe2 comprises at least a scene for each story grammar elements; a visual cue appears in each scene highlighting the corresponding story-grammar component, to help kids understand and reflect on story grammar concepts.

3.2 Story-building FaTe2 supports kids not only as story “consumers” or “spectators” but also as “narrators” and “directors”. It offers an open ended story framework where we give space to “children’s voice” [12], encourage spontaneous storytelling and story structuring, and provide a means to stretch kids’ imagination, practice their language, and develop important narrative skills. We promote two kinds of collaborative storybuilding activities: the creation of a new linear story, and the creation of a hyperstory from a built-in story.

The 2D story is a personal interaction space that kids can explore individually, without being aware of the other’s presence. Co-presence and social interaction occur in the 3D scene (and in the 2D authoring and play environments, as discussed later). Up to 8 kids can be simultaneously connected to the network and virtually co-located in the FaTe2 collaborative environment. The 3D scenes are shared worlds that implement the WYSIWIS (“What You See Is What I See”) paradigm: they synchronize for all users the movements of each single user and the effects of their actions (e.g., the object manipulation required by some games, and the effects of 2D authoring – see next sections). A kid’s presence in a 3D space is rendered by a visible “user embodiment”, or avatar. Avatars give the perception of where the actual users are and what they are looking at, and support co-presence, i.e., “the feeling of “being there” with others in a “virtual situation” made possible by technology” [27]. Widgets (see buttons on the right side of Figure 5) allow each kid to change her view (“VISTA”) of the 3D space – from top (“air view” – “dall’alto”), from the avatar’s eye and from her back (“da dietro”).

Both these activities exploit a 2D Scene Maker tool (Figure 6 ab), which allow kids to put characters and background object on a 2D scene frame (choosing them from a repository of 2D scene elements), to create a textual or vocal narrative, and to associate comic-like dialogues to characters.

Figure 6a: Kids creating their own scene

Figure 5: The control panel (yellow section on the screen bottom)

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“panel” on the Story Lab (Figure 8), and can explore it in 2D or 3D. Depending on the strategy suggested by the teacher or negotiated among the kids, a new story can be created in two ways: sequentially or “randomly”. The first strategy is governed by the same turn-taking rules as the “round-robin” storytelling game played by children in class at elementary schools: kids in turn progressively proceed from the “initiating event” to the “reaction”. Random creation mimics another typical paper based story telling “game” performed in classroom, where kids compose a story by separately and independently writing their story elements and concatenating them at the end of the process. Once a new story is completed, all panels in the Story Lab are filled and the Story Lab becomes a sort of “gallery” – a space for story reading, and an entry point to explore the new tale (Figure 8). In this social virtual space kids can look at and read their narrative works and the ones created by the others, thus promoting the feeling of a “storytelling community”.

Figure 6b: The Story Builder As a new 2D scene is created, a 3D counterpart is generated, using a default 3D “world” and putting the 3D counterparts of the elements appearing in the 2D scene (taken from a repository of 3D story elements).

3.2.1 Building linear stories To contribute to a new linear story, kids invoke the Scene Maker from a 3D space called Story Lab. Here they can see “panels” representing different structural elements of a story, either empty or filled with the 2D scene that another kid has already created. Only empty panels can be selected by a kid for instantiation (Figure 7). A scene is exclusively allocated to the fist kid who “grasps” it, and she is the only user allowed to fill and modify it. During the creation or update of a scene, each kid steers her own view point of the scene under creation. Although the Scene Maker is a personal “private” workspace (nobody but the author can modify a scene), it provides some visual cues to make the user aware of what the other users have done for the same task. For example, it displays a list of empty or full thumbnails that identify the elements of the new story that have been filled or not by others.

Figure 8: Kids watching to others’ stories

3.2.2 Building hyperstories A 2D and 3D hyperstory is built as an “extension” of a built-in story: kids collaboratively create branches of the original narrative flow and generate one or more alternative sub-flows. From any 3D scene of a built-in story, any kid can invoke the Scene Maker and build her own version of the next “scene”, or preview the sub-stories that other kids are building. When a new next scene is “completed”, its 2D and 3D versions are dynamically linked to the corresponding “previous” scene of the built-in story and become shared for exploration. The new scene can be linked to the “next” element of the built-in story, thus representing a simple variant of the original narrative flow. Alternatively, it can become the beginning of a new narrative sub-flow that comprises all the following story elements prescribed by the story grammar. In this case, the system suggests the structural elements that, according to the story grammar, follow the scene that has been just created. Any kid can progressively instantiate the following scenes. To support collaboration and co-presence during this process, the Scene Maker displays a simplified hyperstructure showing interlinked miniaturized scenes of the built-in story and the scenes created by the kids (or proposed by the systems)

Figure 7: Story Lab’s to be filled with the newly created scenes When a scene instantiation is complete, the corresponding 2D and 3D scenes becomes shared, are linked to the previous and next elements of the story, and are integrated with the on-going story space. All users can see the 2D scene on the corresponding

As new scenes are created during the hyperwriting process, the story hyperspace in two and three dimensions dynamically

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“expands” and new navigation capabilities become available. This creates an engaging effect for kids that vaguely resemble the interaction in fluid hypertext narratives proposed by P. Zellweger [45]. And the interactive, dynamic unfolding of alternatives fosters a sense of magic and fluid imaginative amplification

3.3 Play FaTe2 promotes learning by combining educational contents and tasks, with entertainment activities that increase engagement, emotion, and motivation [18][33]. Games have also an intrinsic educational value per se: they foster kids to take information from many sources, to make decisions quickly, to create strategies to overcome obstacles, to understand complex systems through experimentation. FaTe2 games are all inspired by story elements - story grammar concepts, story characters, scenes, and events, and different games are linked to (or executed in) different scenes. We provide three categories of games, focused on different educational goals. Ability games (e.g., moving an avatar across a sequence of flying circles or traversing a 2D labyrinth) promote psychomotor skills. Problem-solving games (e.g., treasure hunt in the 3D space, or puzzles in the 2D space) stimulate creative problem-solving capability. Content-oriented games (e.g., quizzes about story grammar concepts, or about characters and events) foster story-structure comprehension, critical thinking, symbolic imagination, recognition and recall, and provide a field for their exercise, thus preparing the way for the development of abstract thinking and higher mental processes. Linguistic games, inspired by the theory of “The Grammar of Fantasy” by the Italian writer G. Rodari [35], stimulate linguistic skills and promote creative writing . A linguistic game is, for example, “crazy sentences”, which requires kids to identify, in a story fragment, a word that can be changed into a different correct word by replacing, adding, or deleting only a single character, thus creating a “crazy sentence” to be shared with the game mates. Personalization games allow kids to personalize a 3D scene of the built-in story, e.g., by dressing a character or by writing characters’ dialogues in a comic-style [2]).

Figure 10: Personalizing a character’s dress…

Figure 11: and seeing the effects in the 3D space

Figure 12: Accessing the speech bubble activity

Figure 9: Interacting with 3D characters provides access to their personalization

Figure 13: Writing in the speech bubbles…

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3.4 Communication FaTe2 supports synchronous communication among the kids, which can be interplayed with collaborative storytelling and gaming.

Figure 14: … and seeing the effects in the 3D world While the 2D scenes of a built-in story are not affected by a kid’s play, the 3D scene where the games are invoked are “synchronized” with the 2D activities, so that the effects of a game in 2D by a single user are perceived by all other users. For example, a personalized character appears under its new shape in the 3D scene (Figures 9,10,11); a character sentence written in 2D is shown in the characters’ speech bubble in 3D (Figures 12,13,14). In 3D, the link placeholders to activate 2D games are “special” 3D objects (“game objects”) that changes when kids select them and when the corresponding game is completed : a flower “game object, for example, changes colour when selected, and grows when the correspondent game is over (see Figure 16). These visual clues are a way to support co-presence, rendering what the others are doing or have done. They also highlight the first-in/first-out base of the play strategy and of the use of shared resources for play (e.g., in treasure hunt). A locking mechanism manages the 3D shared objects, e.g., the elements that must be discovered during treasure hunt, or the “game objects” that trigger a game, e.g., the characters that can be personalized: a shared object is exclusively allocated to the first user who “grasps” it, and becomes inaccessible to the others. In 2D games, as for scene creation, each user steers her own view point, but visual cues make her aware of what the other users have done for the same task (e.g., the characters that have been personalized by others are marked with a little bullet and cannot be modified, like in Figure 10). FaTe2 supports not only collaboration but also competition. Children are organized in two teams and when a kid completes a game, she gains points for her team. 3D diamonds, visible in all worlds (Figure 15), represent the team score, and grow as points are gained. Different team members can play, in turn, and a “team panel” shows the names of currently co-present kids for each team (see Figure 16 - central area at the bottom). While competition among individuals can sometimes be detrimental to learning in educational settings [38], competition in a team base cooperative setting is a way to engage kids emotionally, to increase interest and participation, and to improve learning: kids love to compete, to get scores, and… to win!

Figure 15: Looking at the “score diamonds” of the two teams A chat tool can be invoked at any time, to send broadcast messages, visible by all users (Figure 16-left side) or “whisper messages”, visible within a team only (Figure16-right side). This form of verbal interaction supports collective decision making and game strategy definition, as well as conflict resolution. But the chat also fosters forms of social interaction that goes beyond the purposes of collaborative storytelling and gaming: it promotes the sense of collaboration on community, since, for example, remotely located kids can introduce themselves and their class, express who they are to each other, and comment the experience as it evolves.

Figure 16: The chat

4. THE DESIGN OF “CHILDREN EXPERIENCE” In the professional practice of interactive system design, “experience” means all the aspects of how people use an interactive product: the way it feels in their hands, how well

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implement the concept of “blended learning”, i.e., of an harmoniously mix of both computer mediated activities and traditional educational work (as it occurs during traditional storytelling in classrooms), keeping the leading role of the teacher, who organizes the work according to her preferences and her students attitudes. In session 1 kids introduce themselves and their class, explore the 2D and 3D built in story, and perform ability games. During session 2, they perform (potentially with the help of the whole class) some content oriented games and build their own story. During session 3, they get engaged with linguistic games and start building their hyperstory. The latter is completed during session 4, when children also spend some time in watching their completed stories and write/comment about them. Between each FaTe2 on-line session, kids discuss the story in class, work on a new story and on its variants, and share their ideas with the collaborating class that is member of the same team (e.g., by email).

they understand how it works, how they feel about it while they’re using it, how well it serves their purposes, and how well it fits into the entire context in which they are using it. ‘User experience’ design encompasses the notion that many aspects determine the type of experience that comes from using an interactive product, and that many aspects can be designed to generate positive results for the users [30]. In FaTe2, this more holistic view of design, which particularly crucial when dealing with complex multiuser artifacts, implies that we need to define not only contents and activities but also the “context” in which they occur: in terms of physical environment (e.g.., where do kids perform the various activities?), time (e.g., when are they performed? in which order? with which priorities?) and social organization (e.g., how are groups formed?). A carefully designed “context” avoids waste of time, disorientation, and ineffective interactions, and is crucial for keeping the experience fast-paced and educationally effective [13]. The knowledge gained during both Learning@Europe project and our preliminary field study, helped us to identify a tentative experience design for all the above aspects. As any design, it requires a validation that can be achieved only when we will put the system on the field and will start a systematic evaluation activity (planned to begin in June 2006). Given the age of our target and the complexity of the system, a preliminary “training” of the key functionality is obviously mandatory before carrying on a “real” collaborative session among physically dispersed kids. In addition, we expect that frequent monitoring and scaffolding should be provided also during the collaborative sessions. For this purpose, we borrow from Learning@Europe the concept of (and the system functionality for) guide, a human tutor who is virtually copresent during every FaTe2 session and appears as a special avatar in the 3D space. The guide is usually a trained person with excellent know how of the system and a good teaching experiences. She communicates with the kids through a dedicated chat area, to propose which activities to undertake (i.e., which “links” to follow), to give hints, to assign penalties for improper behavior and scores for ability games. She also keeps the control of the workflow of each session, “locking” or “unlocking” the access to the different 3D worlds, games, and activities, to reduce the risk of “getting lost in the hyperspace” syndrome, and of ineffective collaboration. The expected context for FaTe2 activities is the school computer lab (in most Italian elementary school classrooms do not have network connection), although situations where kids cannot attend the school (e.g., hospitalized children or children at home for a serious illness) may be also considered. Since FaTe2 can support up to eight users (plus the guide), a group participating in a session may involve classes from different schools (either in two or four geographically dispersed schools), and two users per class. Two or three kids may work shoulder by shoulder on the same computer, alternating themselves in the activities. While their peers are engaged with the system, the other kids in the same class may read the built-in stories in other computers, or watch on a wall projection what happens online, or help to solve quizzes and linguistic games when needed. We have structured a potentially ideal workflow for a FaTe2 “experience” in four main sessions, each one last for approximately 60 minutes, and propose to interplay the use of FaTe2 with classroom activities. In this way, we try to

5. THE SOFTWARE ARCHITECTURE FaTe2 architecture adopts and extends WebTalkII[3] a powerful software framework developed at our lab to support multi-user interaction and communication in web based 3D worlds WebTalkII is built up around the MVC design pattern. The Model represents the shared world state, the View represents each client web application and the Controller is the programming logic that listens to the events raised by the user GUI and manages the shared state. The client side is based upon a Shockwave and a Flash players. On the server side, a Macromedia Flash Media Server manages the interaction between each client and the web server that is used to deploy the application, and maintains the consistency of the 3D shared world state. It detects the events triggered by the different users and distributes the effects on the various clients, so that they can be perceived by all users in the shared 3D environment. For each shared object in the 3D environment, the server maintains several versions: one version of the remote shared object, preserving the state, and several versions of the local shared objects, one for each client, being updated locally. Each time a client modifies a local object feature, this object is synchronized with the correspondent remote object on the server machine and then the modifications are propagated to all the clients. The high degree of flexibility and configurability of WebTalk is achieved by the use of XML files that enable to set up every single aspect of the physical structure of collaborative environment as well as dynamic features of the collaboration. This is useful both when a new session has to be set up and when the environment has to be slightly modified. The architecture used in FaTe2 (Figure17) extends WebTalkII by supporting cooperation and co-presence also in 2D activity spaces, and implementing the communication and interoperability between the 3D and 2D spaces, so that the effects of user interactions in 2D affect the state of the 3D worlds. A new component in FaTe2 is a Flash client that manages the objects and functionality in the 2D applications, interprets the user actions and (via a proper XML file) and communicates the effects of 2D users’ actions to the server. On the server, another new component translates this input into events and object modifications in the 3D shared world, which are broadcasted to all clients

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Figure 17: FaTe2 software achitecture

Kidpad [5] is an authoring tool (born in academia and now commercially available), designed to stimulate children collaboration attitudes, narrative skills, and the capability of developing a non-linear structure of individual story scenes. KidPad supports multiple users (who may also use multiple mice) and encourages collaboration by enabling simultaneous use by two kids of the same drawing or writing tools. It enables kids to work together and to create scenes that can be explored dynamically moving from one part of the drawing to another, or zooming deeply into the drawing space. Integrated with KIDPAD is “The Klump”, and a 3D authoring tools that allow children’s collaborative creation of 3D characters.

6. RELATED WORKS Since the pioneer work of hypertext writers at the beginning of the eighties, mostly focused on hyperfiction, a wide set of environments have appeared for interactive (hyper)storytelling, both in the research community and the market [1,11,23,26,29,31,40]. Only few of them are specifically devoted to children, and in many cases their exploitation of the hypertext paradigm is minimal. In the rest of this section, we provide a brief overview of the most relevant projects in children storytelling, focusing on the ones involving hypertext, collaboration, and 3D features.

StoryMat [12] exploits the paradigm of tangible computing [45]. It offers a space for children to tell and play their own stories, using “tangible” devices: a soft, quilt-like playmate (“mat”) with appliqué objects (such as houses and roads), and stuffed toys equipped with ultrasonic transmitters that allow wireless tracking of animal movements. When children tell their stories on Storymat, their narrating voice and the associated movements of the toys are recorded. A recorded story is then compared with other stories told by the children who have visited the mat previously. One of the past story fragments that share a similar “pattern” with the present story (in terms of story length, toy identity and spatial path it took) is recalled on the math, as a moving shadow of the toy with its narrator’s voice. The child can continue the story she has just heard, or she may continue telling her own story and incorporate some story elements from the story she just heard (thus creating simple hyperstories with multiple narrative paths).

The largest worldwide collection of kids’ on-line story books is the International Children Digital Library (ICDL) [8] [43]. Currently being built by the University of Maryland's HumanComputer Interaction Lab, this digital library comprises over 800 children’s books from around the world and used by roughly 25,000 users from 150 countries each month. The ICDL initiative is combined with a number of projects aimed at exploring how children perceive other cultures outside of their own, investigating the role of books, libraries, technology, and culture in children's lives, exploring social aspects, i.e., how communities of children develop around the ICDL book collection, and building tools that allow intercultural communication between children. CBC4Kids’ Storybuilder [2] is an online collaborative environment developed by CBC - Canadian Broadcasting Corporation – for children aged 8-10. The system allows kids to collaboratively compose simple commix-style on-line hyperstories. Children can create of their own version of the next “scene” (page) in an ongoing story, by selecting and manipulating frame layouts, backgrounds, objects, characters and animations.

Other approaches exploit the concept of mimetic audience, in the sense that kids play roles in the flow of the story (oftentimes interacting on a virtual theatre) and can take advantage of the experience both by playing with it and by reasoning about the characters and the plot.

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Addressing kids may raise new research issues. For example, what are characteristics of hyperreadings [11] when the reader is a kid? Do kids perceive the “getting lost in the hyperspace” in the same way as adults do?

Teatrix [32] is a collaborative virtual environment that provides children with the means for collaboratively creating their story on a 3D virtual stage. Children can use a set of built-in scenes, characters, and characters “roles” (defined according to Propp’s theory [34]), to create stories and see the characters acting on their behalf or autonomously.

It may happen that when dealing with kids as users, our “classical” view of hypertext requires some extensions, or an integration with paradigms and technological solutions of other disciplines. But … isn’t it challenging? Hasn’t hypertext always been a multidisciplinary field, open to inspirations and stimula from other fields?

MOOSE Crossing [9] allows children to construct a virtual environment in which they can interact with one another, design and build the objects and the characters in the virtual space themselves. Each object and character can engage in play behaviors when interacting with human participants, and children are encouraged to write narrative descriptions of their creation, and for their creation to utter.

FaTe2 is an attempt to move in this direction. We could never have conceived such a complex framework for kids without the experience gained in hypermedia design and development, without the reflections on navigation, link semantics, hypernarrative, which the hypertext community have built since the eighties. At the same time, other fields (e.g., HCI, cooperative learning, virtual reality) and our work within real schools have suggested us the integration of hyperwriting and hyperreading concepts with other paradigms, to better meet the kids’ needs.

Other approaches exploit more sophisticated augmented reality technology to support an immersive participation of the users to the storytelling experience. CSCIS (Computer Supported Collaborative Interactive Storytelling) [6] guides storytelling experiences in augmented reality environments, where users wear head mounted displays (“magic glasses”) and the story is interactively narrated via scenes and characters playing within the scenes. Some of them are physical entities in the real context in which a storytelling experience takes place, while others are virtual. Children aged 13-15 take part in the story as dramatic characters, and interact (via voice input) with virtual characters visible on the glasses (on the overlaid stage of the real physical context). The story evolves according to a non-deterministic schema, according to the morphological rules of Propp’s model that is manages by a set of AI modules.

Now, our future plans: The design and software implementation of FaTe2 is almost complete; most functionality have been tested for usability (using inspection based methods), and some components has been experimented with a small group of kids. After the completion of the current version of FaTe2, planned by end of May, we will carry on a field study to assess the ease of use and the educational impact of the various activities, and proceed to re-design. We will also test the overall experience design, and the feasibility of the proposed workflow (which has some obvious organizational difficulties). The experimentation, scheduled in June and September this year, will involve six elementary schools classes from two different towns (Milano and Como) who participated in our previous e-learning projects.

NICE [22] is a virtual learning environment that applies the educational theories of constructivism, and is based on a highly graphical, room-sized immersive virtual space implemented in CAVE™. The system provides an engaging context where multiple children can collaboratively construct, cultivate and tend a healthy virtual garden. They wear special lightweight glasses which allow them to see both the virtual and the physical world, and a lightweight handheld device for interaction. Additional networked participants can remotely participate to the experience, appearing as avatars in the virtual space. A story is progressively formed as kids interact with the virtual world: every action in the environment is translated into a textual sentence, and some words are replaced by iconic representations, to compose a picture book published on a public WWW site.

8. ACKNOWLEGMENTS They authors warmly thanks the teachers and kids of classes 2A, 2B, 2C, and 2D at the elementary school “Nolli Arquati” in Milano, for their enthusiasm and their enormous collaboration in the preliminary design of FaTe2. We would also like to mention the generous technical support received by the Learning@Europe project and by the whole HOC Lab team.

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7. CONCLUSIONS “Given the importance of technology in the lives of young people, it is critical to consider how to create new technologies for children that are easy to use, age-appropriate in content and interface, and foster exciting learning experiences in and out of the classroom. … Researchers today are developing new technologies that enable children to question what they know, to explore and respect other cultures, and to make it possible to love learning, science, story-telling, and creative play.

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