Learning by playing

Supporting and guiding story-creation activities

Isabel Machado1, Paul Brna2, Ana Paiva3 1 INESC and CBLU University of Leeds, Rua Alves Redol 9, 1000 Lisboa 2 CBLU -University of Leeds, E.C. Stoner Building, LS2 9JT Leeds 3 IST-Technical University of Lisbon and INESC, Rua Alves Redol 9, 1000 Lisboa
Abstract. In this paper, we describe an architecture for supporting and guiding children story-creation activities. Stories and story telling activities are present in all children developmental stages, assuming distinct roles in each stage. Within the scope of this research, our target population is children aged 7-9 years old, within the portuguese education context within which we are working, for whom story-telling activities assume a more structured format. At this developmental stage, children are more prone to rule-based games, in which they tend to create their own rules or even compete inside them. Our approach is based on the assumption that by experiencing different situations children at this stage are able to develop: (1) their notions of narrative; and (2) their social skills and interpersonal relationships. To achieve such goals we are developing a general architecture, which may be applied in different story creation applications, that aims at supporting and guiding children in the collaborative story-creation process. Simultaneously, we want to trigger some moments during which they are able to reflect on the narrative, which may lead the children to analyse, criticise and revise their own story decisions.

Introduction

In the last years, a new trend in intelligent learning environments has been observed. Making learning a more flexible and intuitive activity is now the goal of several researchers, and story telling, make-believe and fantasy activities have been the inspiration (e.g. Puppet [1], Kidstory [2], Little Planet Literacy Series [3]). Cognitive development theorists and psychologists ([4], [5], [6]) suggested that through makebelieve activities children start to make sense of the world that surrounds them, and to explore their environment. Through direct interaction and exploration, they start to assign categories and concepts to the objects and events of the world. Moreover, they become able to make some variations in the flow of their fantasy games. By doing this they acquire knowledge about the external and mysterious world that surrounds them [7]. From Piagets theory, this evolution of the make-believe activities allows children to perform different roles, and gain control of the course of the action. Through this they acquire the skills to organise the sequence of play and most important to project these experiences onto the cognitive and social requirements of the real world. In middle-childhood years, when children go to school, they are confronted with a huge amount of new knowledge; they discover new forms of fantasy and make-believe that will help them to master all this novelty. Fantasy emerges in the form of board, computer and video games and even in creative drama and theatrical performances on the school premises. Even without realising it, children make use of story telling and pretending as a medium to communicate and even to integrate themselves in this new social world. At this developmental stage, children are more prone to rule-based games, in which they tend to create their own rules or even compete inside them [7].

Considering these findings, we realised that we could try to devise an architecture that would address the benefits inherent in fantasy and make-believe activities. With this architecture, we aim at providing children with support and guidance in collaborative story creation and at the same time provide them with the means to: - improve their notions of narrative; - develop their social skills and interpersonal relationships. In this paper, we will first present a Portuguese school, O Nosso Sonho, in which story telling and dramatic games play an important role in their pedagogical and educational strategy. This school was also very important in the development of the architecture because its pedagogical approach and its activities were taken as the starting point for our work. Next, the support and guidance architecture will be defined, as well as some of the concepts and considerations that are crucial to its usage. As an example of its application, we will explain how such an architecture can be applied to a virtual story creation application, Teatrix [8]. Finally, some conclusions will be drawn.

Motivation

O Nosso Sonho is a Portuguese school, with a very particular pedagogical approach. Since it is not a curricular school, O Nosso Sonho aims at providing the children with the possibility to freely choose their daily activities and through this, promoting the acquisition of mature decisions by the children. Furthermore, in this school drama and story telling activities are a constant presence in the childrens daily activities. Children, from different age groups, experience and meet story telling and fantasy in a wide range of formats, such as: dramatisation of well-known fairy tales; dramatic performances; writing of stories; and construction of props or clothes to use in the performances (with paper, plasticine, etc.). With the goal of identifying: (1) which were the most important features in stories, and in the story-creation process (in written and play format); (2) and also, which age group would benefit more from our architecture, we conducted a set of empirical studies in this school. The empirical studies involved observations of children performing dramatic games and reading/analysing some of their written stories (for further details [9]). The data collected from these empirical studies suggested that: 1. the fairy tales theme was present in both the dramatic performances and written stories; 2. younger children (4-6 years old) experienced the dramatic games in a much more free and unstructured way, which leads to more frequent teacher interventions. However, the objective of the dramatic games, in this age group, is also more directed at the exploration and discovery of new objects, emotions, situations than intended for the acquisition of the concept of narrative sequence; 3. older children (7-9 years old) had a much more responsible and accurate knowledge of the rules and when performing, for example, a fairy-tale play they coordinate themselves with the result that the teacher rarely intervened; 4. in dramatic performances older groups identified their roles in the story easily, and stayed in character most of the play time. 5. some of the written stories analysed showed a mixture between everyday themes and fairy tales, for example: a fairy tale character, a prince, working in a supermarket. These results were not very surprising because, as we have seen in the previous section, older children in this context face story telling and fantasy in a much more structured and rule-based format. In other contexts, such as that found in an English County Primary school shows a related behaviour with 5-6 year old children working within a structured classroom environment (see

[10]). Therefore, this finding raises the possibility to develop an architecture that would support such story activities, in a game-like way, and at the same time try to tackle the social relations development issue. Another important issue was the constant presence of fairy tales, since nowadays so many new virtual heroes exist (e.g. Pokemon, Dragon Ball, etc).

Support And Guidance Architecture (SAGA)

The Support And Guidance Architecture (SAGA) is being developed with the aim of being integrated (like a plug-in facility) in story creation applications. Furthermore, since one of the goals of the architecture is to mediate and even promote interpersonal skills, this architecture should be applied in a collaborative story creation environment. 3.1 Design From the results of the empirical studies conducted in O Nosso Sonho, we identified that fairy tales were a constant presence in childrens stories. Based on this finding, we decided to adopt as a starting point the work on narrative analysis conducted by Vladimir Propp [11]. Propp analysed one hundred Russian folktales and identified a common structure to all of them. This structure is composed by a set of 31 functions, which can be understood as both the actions of the characters and the consequences of these actions for the story. The characters were distributed among seven types (or roles) being each of them characterised by a subset of the 31 functions. These roles define and establish the functional behaviour of a character, by means of the specification of the actions and goals for it. The roles specified by Propp are: villain, hero, donor, helper, princess (and father), dispatcher and false hero. Therefore, at this point we can already identify some of the major concepts in the architecture: - story - is a sequence constituted by the 31 functions. Some of these functions can be omitted from a story. Nevertheless, a story must be started by a villainy or a lack , and proceeds through intermediary functions to a reward, a gain or in general a liquidation of misfortune. To sum up, the actions of the characters in a story flow from a starting point where an initial complication is established, goes through the climax point, down to the conclusion of the story. In drama studies, these three points are part of Freytags triangle [12], which was proposed as the structure of a dramatic incident. In fact, the functions of the actions of the characters and their causality, is according to many writers, one of the most important aspects of a story. - function - which can be understood as both the actions of the characters and the consequences of these actions for the story. - role a set of behaviours (specified by a set of functions) that are known to both the characters and audience [13]. Additionally, and also based on the results of the empirical studies, we defined the concept of an actor. This concept emerges from the theatrical performances, and was considered because it enhances the model with more variability. An actor is the physical representation or appearance of a character (example: a young girl, a wolf, a witch, etc.). And finally, a character is the conjunction of two different concepts: an actor and a role. The character is the one that acts in the story, accordingly to its role and in the skin of the actor. 3.2 Integration with the Story Creation Application To use the facilities provided by SAGA, the story creation application must understand the set of concepts presented in the previous section and to have two important properties:

to be observable SAGA must be able of inspecting the state of the application and also of identifying the childrens actions in it. - and to allow changes SAGA must be able to introduce new elements in the story creation application or even to take some actions in the story creation application. To this end, we defined a communication protocol between the story creation application and SAGA, which establishes the directives that will allow the flow of information between the systems. 3.3 Components of the Support and Guidance Architecture The development of SAGA is being conducted with the aim of dividing the several phases associated with the story creation process among the several components (see Figure 1).

Figure 1 - Support and Guidance Architecture

The development of SAGA was based on the assumption that the story creation process is constituted by two distinct phases: story definition/preparation and story construction (de facto). In the first phase the children would define the basic elements for their story: the cast and setting, and in the second they collaborate between themselves to build their story. The collaboration can be achieved explicitly through personal interactions or mediated by the system through the actions children can perform in order to create the story (i.e., a child directing a character that plays the role of the helper can collaborate with other child that directs the hero in order to defeat the character villain. Therefore, the second phase is highly dependent on the story application that is using the services of SAGA (for example, we could have applications that provide the children with the means to create their story in the format of a play, a cartoon, etc.). However, for SAGA, this kind of decision is completely transparent, providing that the application follows the properties referred to previously. The components of SAGA are: the Facilitator, the ScriptWriter, the Director Agent , the Narrative Guidance Engine and the Reflection Engine. The Facilitator is the component of SAGA, which establishes the bridge between the architecture and the story creation application. The ScriptWriter has as its main goal to build an initial story situation in accordance with the story elements previously chosen by the children. The definition of the storys initial situation was based on the work of Propp, and can be specified as the situation in which the characters are introduced, the relations between such characters are established, and the story is situated in terms of temporal and spatial localisation [11]. Propp defined two types of initial story situation:

(1) a situation including the seeker hero, already knowing the difficult task that he must conquer; (2) a situation including the villains victim (victim hero) already injured by the villain. Therefore, the ScriptWriter constructs the initial story situation based on this set of premises and also on the story elements already chosen by the children. To this end, a set of templates is established. A story template is defined by a set of minimum requisites that must be satisfied to have an initial story situation. The set of minimum requisites is defined by specifying the minimum set of roles required for each type of story template. The types of story-templates already considered were derived from Propps theory and they are the following: - story template with a seeker hero - the story template has as pre-conditions the: (1) existence of a character performing the hero role and (2) another character - possibly the character performing the role of beloved person or parent - who assigned a difficult task to the hero (which he has to accomplish during the story progression). Hence, the motive of the story will be accomplishing the difficult task with success. - story template with a victim hero - the story template has as pre-conditions the: (1) existence of a character performing the hero role and (2) another character performing the villain role - otherwise there would not be anyone to do the villainy. Hence, the motive of the story will be primarily to defeat the villain. Although, the motive can be established at a large-grain size, by the type of story template, there is also the need to establish a set of challenges to be discovered throughout the story progression. These challenges aim at enhancing the story with an extra degree of suspense, which would be translated into a more interesting experience for the children (in a game like way). The main goal of the Narrative Guidance Engine is to generate the space of all plot points for a particular story. A plot point is an important story situation, which should be played by the children in order to achieve the goal of the story (similar to the approach taken in the OZ project [14]). These plot points will be defined from the initial story situation and from the functional roles performed by the characters - closely related with the narrative structure defined by Propp. The space of all plot points is the result of all paths between plot points that make possible the achievement of the end of the story, implicitly reaching also the goal of the story. To evaluate, at each point in time, which is the best path to follow an evaluation function was defined. This evaluation function has to assess which are the candidates for being the next plot point. Such evaluation has to make sure that the selected plot point will make the story creation process a fulfilling experience for the children (in terms of improving their concept of narrative and also providing a rich collaborative experience), and simultaneously that will take into account the actions previously chosen by the children. The Director Agent is the component that has the responsibility of deciding how and when should be provided any kind of support to the story creation activity. Although, we do not want to impose the presence of a director agent in childrens story creation activities, we would like to provide them at least with some character (implicit or explicit) that can act coherently with its task and also provide the children with the means to engage in an entertainment experience, which can meet childrens cognitive needs to interpret, understand and interact with the world in term of stories [15]. To do this, we are developing the concept of a narrative agent. This narrative agent uses its sensors to get information from the story world and based on that information decides whether it should provide any support or guidance to the children, implicitly or explicitly through its actuators. This decision process is performed with the help of the agents narrative memory. Its narrative memory is organised in the form of episodes and contains information about the story progression from each story character's point of view. For example, if there are three characters

in the story, the narrative agent will maintain three different stories (each one from a different point of view). Each episode is constituted by three important events: crisis, climax and resolution [16]. In detail, every episode contains: the description of relevant elements (such as: the setting and characters), a conflict, a transition, a crisis, a climax and a resolution. The episodes are organised in a temporal sequence and with cause-effect links. In the end of the story creation activity the narrative agent can use the various character-centred stories, stored in its memory, to generate a unique story that reflects the overall experience of the story creation activity. To better understand how the Director Agent interacts with the other components of SAGA. The Director Agent : 1. receives the set of all possible plots points from the narrative guidance engine; 2. creates a model of the story world - based on the information obtained from narrative guidance engine. In this model it represents the several scenes, props and characters. In particular, for the characters only the minds (assuming that they are represented as agents) are represented, and their behaviour and goals are defined in accordance with their roles in the story. At story-creation time the Director Agent has also a very important role: 1. when it receives information from the Facilitator, it updates its model of the story world and searches for new episodes. To do this, the Director Agent inspects the characters goals in order to find conflicts among characters. When it detects a conflict of goals between two characters, it adds to its memory a new episode in each of their stories. 2. when an episode is completed the Director Agent compares it with the set of next candidate plot points, and in case of a match informs the Narrative Guidance Engine and asks for an update of the set of next plot points. 3. also, each time it receives an information directive from the Facilitator and updates its story world model. The Director Agent also has the important role of asking a child to reflect upon the actions performed by her character. This can happen, for example, when it detects a conflict between the actions performed by the child and her characters role. To trigger such reflection moments the Director Agent communicates with another component of SAGA: the reflection engine. The Reflection Engine is the component that on demand (by the Director Agent ) generates a reflection moment. The theory behind the design of such component was based on the research of Dorothy Heathcote on acting in classroom drama [17]. The idea is that a child is asked to freeze her characters actions and explain the meaning of her characters current behaviour. The reflection moment is composed by a question, which tries to make the children think and justify why her character performed a certain action. Additionally, all the other children collaborating in the story creation process should be informed about such reflection, since it can influence the flow and development of the story.

Integration with the Teatrix Application

Teatrix is an application developed under the NIMIS (Networked Interactive M edia In Schools) project, which was an EU-funded project under the Experimental School Environments (ESE) program. It is a collaborative virtual environment for story creation, which provides the children with the means for collaboratively creating their story on a virtual stage. The children are able to create the stories using a set of pre-defined scenes and characters. These characters may act on behalf of the children or autonomously (for further details see [18], [8], [19]). Teatrix was developed as a three-phase application: (1) the backstage option definition of the story

elements; (2) the on stage option collaborative acting of the story by the children with each child controlling a character during the story; (3) and the audience option children have the chance to watch their stories and even write about them. The application of SAGA in Teatrix is distributed among the first and second phases described above. In the backstage option, the ScriptWriter has the opportunity to take the choices of the children and to set up an initial story situation. This initial story situation is then used to start the acting part (on stage option). To better explain how SAGA is applied, lets look at a partial example of story creation activity played by two children. When the acting of the story starts the Narrative Guidance Engine generates the space of all plot points associated with this story. In this story, in particular, there are two characters, Baddy a wolf (actor) performing the role of the villain - and Maria a girl performing the role of the hero. At this point of the story, both of characters meet in the forest (see Figure 2). The Director Agent based on: (1) the information received from the Facilitator about the interventions made by the children; (2) and on the structure defined by the Narrative Guidance Engine, will keep track of the flow of the story. For example, in the situation shown in Figure 2, for the story to progress - and considering the roles assigned to the characters - the character Baddy should try to harm or deceive Maria.

Figure 2 - Story creation phase If this doesnt happen the Director Agent may intervene and trigger a reflection moment for the child controlling Baddy - aided by the Reflection Engine. The reflection moments in Teatrix are presented to the children in the format of a reflection tool, which stops the storys progression and gives the possibility to the owner of the character that triggered the reflection moment to justify its actions (see Figure 3) [20].

Figure 3 - Reflection tool Hot Seating With the feedback received from the reflection moment, the Director Agent will decide what do next. For instance, if the child decides to ignore her characters role and do nothing to the other character, the Director Agent may decide to introduce a new object or even a new character that will force a conflict to occur. This cycle would be repeated until the story comes to its end.

Future Steps

The research presented in this paper is ongoing and future work includes not only further development of the components of SAGA, but also an evaluation within the school context (with the Teatrix application) for which the main goal will be to evaluate the level of adequacy of the support and guidance mechanism implemented by SAGA. The evaluation of SAGA will mostly try to compare the differences between the narrative productions achieved with and without the use of SAGA. The main issues that we are interested to analyse are: the impact of SAGA on the structure of the stories created and on also the influence of the Reflection Engine on the stories (for example: if children carry to the story what has been discussed in the reflection moments). A further test of the validity of SAGA would be to try to integrate it with a commercial computer game, and examine the benefits of the introduction of narrative structure and whether this introduction would make the children's experiences more entertaining and even more educationally valuable.

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