Towards Designing Enactment-Scaffolded Narrative Authoring Tools for Elementary-School Children

Zarei, N., Quek, F., Chu, S. L., & Brown, S. A. (2021, June)

IDC ’21: Proceedings of the 20th Annual ACM Interaction Design and Children Conference

https://doi.org/10.1145/3459990.3460726

Many story authoring tools have been designed to support children’s creativity through story enactment. However, at school, children are encouraged to engage in formal modes of expression, such as writing. This paper aims to explore how we may design tools that support children in writing using body-based enactment as a scaffold. In our study, 17 children used an interactive story authoring system to enact and record stories as videos and then write the stories while viewing them. We compared the story enactment videos and the corresponding written story essays in terms of the narrative structure, content, and coherence. Our results show a significant difference in story structure in the two formats and a marginally significant difference in the coherence ratings. We present our findings in terms of learned lessons for designing children’s enactment-based authoring tools to encourage more substantial written outcomes.