PUPPET: playing and learning in a virtual world

When a child is engaged in improvisational play, representations of the activity are transient. Thus, to reflect on or change what has been done requires great effort of memory. This paper argues that by recording aspects of children's activity while they are engaged in improvisational play, virtual environments can provide powerful tools to support children's reflection about aspects of narrative. A virtual environment called PUPPET is introduced, which aims to allow children to engage in playful interaction with autonomous agents, while recording dialogue for the characters in the world. An evaluation of the PUPPET system suggests that children found the environment to be a motivating and engaging one. Furthermore, recording and editing dialogue for the characters in the world was found to be successful in eliciting reflective thought and discussion between the children.

[1]  Martin Klesen,et al.  A Dramatised Actant Model for Interactive Improvisational Plays , 2001, IVA.

[2]  Yvonne Rogers,et al.  Informing the design of a virtual environment to support learning in children , 2001, Int. J. Hum. Comput. Stud..

[3]  Ana Paiva,et al.  Is the wolf angry or... just hungry? , 2001, AGENTS '01.

[4]  A. Jonker.  Origins of the modern mind. Three stages in the evolution of culture and cognition , 1998 .

[5]  Barbara Hayes-Roth,et al.  Story-marking with improvisational puppets , 1997, AGENTS '97.

[6]  Yvonne Rogers,et al.  External cognition: how do graphical representations work? , 1996, Int. J. Hum. Comput. Stud..

[7]  Mitchel Resnick,et al.  Constructionism in Practice: Designing, Thinking, and Learning in A Digital World , 1996 .

[8]  Barbara Hayes-Roth,et al.  Directed improvisation with animated puppets , 1995, CHI 95 Conference Companion.

[9]  M. Donald.  Origins of the Modern Mind: Three Stages in the Evolution of Culture and Cognition , 1993 .

[10]  Andrew Ortony,et al.  The Cognitive Structure of Emotions , 1988 .

[11]  Lucy A. Suchman,et al.  Plans and Situated Actions: The Problem of Human-Machine Communication (Learning in Doing: Social, , 1987 .

[12]  Herbert A. Simon,et al.  Why a Diagram is (Sometimes) Worth Ten Thousand Words , 1987, Cogn. Sci..

[13]  J. Edwards.  Genetic Epistemology , 1971 .

[14]  J. Piaget,et al.  The early growth of logic in the child : classification and seriation , 1965 .

[15]  Vladimir Propp,et al.  Morphology of the folktale , 1959 .

[16]  Yvonne Rogers,et al.  External cognition, innovative technologies, and effective learning , 2005 .

[17]  Ana Paiva,et al.  Heroes, villians, magicians, …: dramatis personae in a virtual story creation environment , 2001, IUI '01.

[18]  Pat George,et al.  The Communication of Meaningful Emotional Information for Children Interacting with Virtual Actors , 1999, IWAI.

[19]  L. Quéré.  Cognition in Practice , 1996 .

[20]  A. Ortony,et al.  What's basic about basic emotions? , 1990, Psychological review.

[21]  P. Ekman.  Emotion in the human face , 1982 .