Page 214 - Socially Intelligent Agents Creating Relationships with Computers and Robots

Chapter 24

ME, MY CHARACTER AND THE OTHERS

1
Isabel Machado and Ana Paiva 2
1
ISCTE, INESC, CBLU - University of Leeds
2
IST-Technical University of Lisbon, INESC

Abstract Dramatic games can develop communication skills, instill confidence in children
and encourage teamwork. Inspired by these games we have developed a collab-
orative virtual story-creation environment called Teatrix. Teatrix is an innovative
application, where children may build their own “virtual stories”. Going further
than merely providing the children with the means to act their stories, Teatrix
also offers them the possibility to reflect upon their own actions during story
creation time. This chapter explains how children can create their stories in
Teatrix, by controlling their synthetic characters in a 3D world.

1. Introduction

Drama plays an important role in children cognitive development. Dramatic
games can develop communication skills, instill confidence in children and
encourage teamwork [8]. Based on these findings, and focusing on the role of
collaboration in dramatic games we designed a system called (Teatrix), which
was essentially inspired by many of the activities that exist in children’s dra-
matic games.
With Teatrix children can create virtual plays by controlling the characters
in 3D worlds. Each child controls her character, which means that she has to:
(1) take into account her character’s role in the story; (2) reflect upon why her
character has taken a certain action, i.e., taking her character’s perspective and
respond for its behaviour; (3) consider the other children’s opinions about the
story, in order to contribute meaningfully for their collaborative task.
In this chapter we will describe the experiences we had with dramatic games,
which led to some design decisions in Teatrix. These decisions aim at foster-
ing collaboration and the emergence of a common story by a group of children.
We will argue that such emergence needs some high level discussion, which