| dc.description.abstract | Narrative is an important part of how humans make sense of the world and express their thoughts and feelings. For children, stories are the predominant way in which they organize and express ideas and imagination. Hence, stories have a significant role in children’s various play activities, especially pretend-play. At around the third to fifth grade period (8-10 years old), children are expected and encouraged to transition from embodied play to more formal linguistic modes of expression, such as writing. Supporting the child in this critical developmental stage is therefore very important in their development of writing proficiency. Research in writing support tools for children has generally focused more on facilitating the technical aspects of writing. But tapping into the potential of child’s embodied imagination capacity for writing support is less explored.
This dissertation research poses the question that given the affinity children have for embodied activities and mediums, how can we use this potential in technology design to scaffold more formal types of expression. Within this scope, we present research that investigates the design of embodied technology to support narrative writing for novice writers during the third to fifth grade transition period. By developing a set of interactive tools and evaluating these tools with child participants, I explore how free-form play may be harnessed in systems to facilitate planning and writing an imaginative narrative at the elementary school level. Through this design exploration, I aim to extend the understanding of how using such embodied and interactive tools may augment the process in which children write stories and support them in writing more complex stories.
We began our exploration by focusing on the development of a tool for capturing child’s enactment. Designed based on the concept of enactment-scaffolded authoring (also known as performative authoring), a story authoring system is presented whereby children’s story enactment is transformed in real-time into an animated video recording. Using this testbed system we investigated how children use enactment to plan their stories - as a “prewriting” activity. We also explored how features of the recorded video can augment the child’s experience and performance in the writing activity. Our studies provided evidence that using story-relevant avatars in the enacted video can support the child’s imagination, allowing them to focus on technical aspects of writing. We also uncovered that transforming the enacted story into written form is a challenge for children, so they need process support to translate the planned story into written form. We present design suggestions for children’s enactment-based authoring systems based on our findings.
The next step of this research addresses the process support needed for children to transform a visual narrative into written form. We begin with a set of interviews with elementary school teachers to understand the general requirements for writing process support. An interface is developed that allows the child to watch an animated video and write the story in the video. The design is improved and finalized based on feedback from teacher interviewees. Using this system, we investigate two methods of implementing process support grounded in theories of multimedia learning and embodied cognition. Our results show that the cue design can affect how children respond to the cues, which in turn affects their writing performance. Temporally-situated cues support more structured and cohesive writing, while visually situated cues elicit more descriptive writing from children.
The body of work that is presented in this dissertation contributes (i) An understanding of the opportunities and challenges of enactment-scaffolded narrative authoring for children and (ii) Design choices for embodied narrative writing support tools for children. The findings have significance in various domains of human-computer interaction research, including interaction design for children and interactive digital storytelling. Additionally, the interdisciplinary findings have significance in media studies, education research, and psychology to create more efficient educational content and pedagogical practice for the child audience. | |
