StoryMat : a computer-mediated space for children's fantasy play and collaborative storytelling

Abstract

Fantasy play serves an important role in preschool children's development. Making up characters and telling stories around them are activities through which children make sense of and test out their hypotheses about the world. While computers are increasingly present in the world of young children, there is a lack of computational systems that would support children's voice in everyday storytelling, particularly in the context of fantasy play. This thesis introduces StoryMat, an instantiation of a system that supports children's fantasy play. StoryMat offers a child-driven play space by recording and recalling children's own narrating voices, and the movements they make with their toys on the mat. Stories from the past are conjured up on the mat as a narrating moving shadow of the toy, when they are triggered by the present stories that are similar to them. The empirical research with preschool children showed that StoryMat fostered a particular kind of fantasy play that is storytelling. It was also shown that children, with or without a playmate, on StoryMat listened to and incorporated elements from StoryMat stories, in a similar way they do with stories from their real life peer. By listening to and incorporating elements from peer stories offered by StoryMat, the children's stories and the experience of telling them became richer. The thesis addresses the importance of supporting children's fantasy play and suggests a new way for technology to play an integral part in that activity.