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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.
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