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Me, My Character and the Others 203
However, after some sessions with this first version children started to de-
mand more understanding on what was really happening in the story. Also,
they would ask aloud their peers about what was happening. In general, they
demanded some higher degree of control over their characters. They wanted
to better understand what the characters meant when performing a certain be-
haviour. To respond to their demands we introduced a new type of control over
the characters.
The idea was to offer the children with the possibility to reflect upon their
characters’ behaviours at story creation time and control that behaviour. This
meta level of control is implemented as a tool called the “Hot-Seating”, which
gives the children the possibility to freeze the story time, put themselves into
their characters’ shoes and explain the character’s behaviours [2]. When a child
enters the “Hot-Seating” she is asked to answer a set of questions concerning
the behaviour of the character. Such justifications are then shared with all the
other children in the same virtual play.
These reflection moments may happen at the child’s demand or when the ap-
plication detects that a character is not in character (see [4] for further details).
With this tool we aimed at providing the children with more information about
the story, which, we believed, would lead to a richer type of collaboration.
We have installed a new version of Teatrix in the school and so far the results
are quite positive. In spite of the fact that in the first two weeks children tended
to ignore the reflection moments (even if triggered by the system), in the last
couple of weeks they started to use more often the reflection tool and to jus-
tify their character’s behaviour. So the “Hot-Seating” was easily understood.
However, we still haven’t found any significant results that establish a relation
between the presence of the “Hot-Seating” and the quality of collaboration
established between peers in the same virtual play.
6. Final Remarks
This chapter provided an overview of some of the design decisions taken
in the construction of Teatrix, a collaborative virtual environment for story
creation by young children. We described results of the observations made
with children performing dramatic games, and, based on these observations
we introduced a new approach for character control and communication in
Teatrix.