The main idea behind this
research is to study and build a narrative guiding model to be applied in young children make
believe activities. Story telling and make-believe activities occupy an important and fundamental role in children’s
development. When engaged in a make-believe activity, children take different roles, acquire control of the ow of action and
start to sequence the events of a play.
Furthermore, children
implicitly acquire skills to organise the skills to project these experiences into the cognitive and social requirements of the
real world. By taking advantage of the advances in technology, it is possible nowadays, to bring these make-believe activities into
the computerised world. However, only bringing these activities into the world of technology is not enough.
Children are the ones
that must participate in the process of design and development of such new environ-ments. In this case, I envision the development
of the narrative guiding model with the help of children and more important for the children to use and to take benefit. Since
story telling and make believe activities assume different roles in the different child developmental stages, another important
issue to be considered was to identify which group age could benefit more from such a guiding narrative model and how
such model should be developed.
Taking this evidence in
consideration, I intend to study how I can enhance a story environment with features that would promote children’s
engagement and, maybe implicitly, learning. Also, the aim is to investigate how children collaborate during their make believe
activities and how I can model such collaboration in order to decide which is the best way to support such activity.
To
conclude, the main idea is to study how children engage and take benefits from make believe activities, and
design and develop an architecture that is able to mediate such activity, according to the needs of the
age group, and thus providing a richer experience.
Given the definition and rationale outlined above, one of the
main goals of this project is to build a narrative guiding model to be applied in story environments (collaborative or
single-user). Within the scope of this report a story environment is a software application that aims at providing the children
with means for building and creating new stories. It is also assumed that each child has a character to command or direct
throughout the make-believe activity.
For the application of the
model being developed in this thesis, it is only important that such environment complies or follows a set of well-defined
directives (associated with the concepts of characters, characters’ roles, characters’ actions, story scenes, etc.). With
the narrative guiding model I aim to gently support and guide the children’s experience in a story environment to fulfill their
needs and expectations for such a particular story. In order to accomplish such goal, I will try to answer the following
questions:
• Is it possible to apply the research on narrative
structure analysis for the design of such guiding model?
• Is
it possible to mediate children’s re ection upon their performance in the make-believe activity through such guiding
model?
• Is it possible to mediate children’s collaboration
through the guiding model?
• Is it possible to provide the
support that would help the children to improve their concept of narrative?
These questions will serve as basis for the design and
development of a computational architecture for guiding and supporting story telling activities.