Page 216 - Socially Intelligent Agents Creating Relationships with Computers and Robots

Me, My Character and the Others 199

and so it was common to see two friends in close interaction inside the
story (and even forget their roles).
Teacher intervention - the teacher was always present in all the perfor-
mances. In the case of the younger group, the teacher had much more
active interventions and control. Usually, the teacher played the role of
director and narrator of the story. Differently, the children in the older
group were able to play these roles by themselves (often, one of the
characters would spontaneously turn into a kind of director), leading the
teacher to the position of a spectator.
Presence of audience - we observed performances with and without au-
dience. On the one hand the audience provided a motivational factor and
influenced the children’s performances (they wanted to show the others
how well they acted). On the other hand the audience played the role of
a distracting and sometimes perturbing factor.
As a result of the observations, we decided to focus our research and de-
velopment in the age group of 7 to 9. Further, from the observations we were
able to identify some features of children’s dramatic games, which served as
functional elements in the design of Teatrix. Some of these features were:
Phases- there are several phases in the dramatic games. The first phase-
the preparation includes: story selection and discussion, selection of the
characters and the choice of the actors and props. The second phase is
the acting itself. The final phase is a discussion phase about the perfor-
mance done.
Action and use of props- children selected from their classroom several
different objects that they used for the acting, ascribing them different
meanings.

Interaction between the children- we were able to distinguish two types
of interactions between children: (1) “performance level interactions”
when children interact through their characters by their actions and sen-
tences; and (2) “co-ordination interactions”, when children provide sig-
nals to the others, give orders, make demands or simply inform the oth-
ers about issues related with the ongoing play. Note that this type of
coordination is done during the performance, as the play develops.

3. Application: Teatrix
Taking the results of our observations we developed Teatrix 2 which aims
at providing effective support for children developing their notions of narra-
tive through the dramatisation of different situations (reflecting a participatory
design approach taken in the NIMIS project - see [3]). Inspired by the ritual