Face-to-face collaboration technology for children

Face-to-face communication and collaboration are important aspects of young children’s healthy development. One of the most successful approaches to support this development, Tools of the Mind (ToM), a Vygotskyan approach to early childhood education with an emphasis on roleplaying specific characters, involving extensive training and support to implement. I worked together with 3-4-year-old children over 39 design sessions to develop a system of stories, play planning and use of an interactive learning tool, called StoryCarnival, that lowers the barriers to employing ToM-style play. During this process, children provided all the creative ideas that influenced the design. Working with a new group of 3-year-old and a new group of 4-5-year-old children, I compared implementing ToM-style play both with and without StoryCarnival specific stories or learning tools. I found that StoryCarnival helped children stay on-task, that the activities (with or without technology supports) fit better with 3-year-olds than with 4-5-year-olds, that different types of stories motivated different types of role play, and that group size and style of researcher support impacted the quality of the play. Based on my research results, I designed a Free Text with Suggestions phone application to support single person control of the interactive learning tool. This phone app dramatically decreased adult users’ frustration and physical demands while increasing their feelings of success.