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198 Socially Intelligent Agents

is not achieved by the simple control of synthetic characters at a simple action
level. Then we will provide some discussion on how to achieve such high level
discussions and present some results already obtained.

2. Context

To better inform the design of Teatrix, we performed a set of studies in a
Portuguese school called “O Nosso Sonho”. This school’s pedagogical ap-
proach follows the argument that each child must be free to choose her own
1
daily activities .To do so, “O Nosso Sonho” has several thematic rooms in
which the children can experience different types of activities. One of such
rooms is dedicated to dramatic games. There, we conducted a set of observa-
tions of children’s story performances. To test different factors influencing the
resulting performances, we selected two groups of children of different ages
(one group of 4 to 6 years old and another of 7 to 9 years old). With these two
groups, we wanted to observe not only how the children engaged in the story
performance but also what types of collaboration existed during acting. The
stories performed by both groups were the following fairy tales: “The three
little pigs”, “Cinderella”and “Hansel and Gretel”.
The analysis of the observations was not trivial as interactions in dramatic
games occurred at different levels, and in parallel between different partici-
pants. Nevertheless, from the data collected (video recording and notes taken
before, during and after the performances) we were able to identify several
factors that influenced, not only the acting, but also the collaboration threads
that emerged from these performances. These factors were:

Age of the children - for the younger group the dramatic games were
important not for resulting “play”, but mostly because of the interaction
opportunity that emerged from the activity. Young children had diffi-
culty to stay in character and the story itself was not achieved in the
majority of cases. In fact, the use of dramatic games at this age group
aims at promoting children’s interactions and also the experiencing of a
multitude of different situations that can help such children to deal with
their inner fears [1]. Collaboration, inside or outside the story, occurred
rather occasionally and usually in situations where two friends interacted
with each other. Differently, the older group was more prone to stay in
character and the children’s interactions were mostly originated by the
plot itself. In this group, the collaboration occurred not only inside the
story between characters but also as a way to coordinate their positions,
turns, props, etc.

Inter-relationships - during the performances children, specially the youn-
ger ones, had the tendency to bring their daily relationships into the story,