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In a post-lockdown context with significant concerns about children’s social skills, it is important for technologies to play a positive role in supporting children across cultures, settings, and backgrounds. The research presented in this work-in-progress is about StoryCarnival, a technology designed to promote creative, social role play among preschool children. We conducted StoryCarnival play sessions for three weeks with a group of 3-4-year-old children in Montevideo, Uruguay, a very different setting from the one where StoryCarnival was designed. We present preliminary results suggesting the activities resulted in a significant increase in children’s social play. We also discuss the impact of cultural differences and describe experiences with some features of StoryCarnival that had not previously been used in the field.
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Supporting Sociodramatic Play at the Individual Level
High-quality sociodramatic play helps children develop executive function skills which bolster their performance in school. Technology supports can scaffold social play for children who struggle to engage otherwise. This case study examines the impact of a specific system, StoryCarnival, on one 3-year-old child's engagement in sociodramatic play with his peers.comparing this child's participation in sessions using either StoryCarnival or a traditional intervention over eight weeks, StoryCarnival appeared to lower barriers to this child's physical and verbal engagement in social play. Future research could identify whether this pattern may hold for other children who have trouble entering social play with peers.
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- Award ID(s):
- 1908476
- PAR ID:
- 10273583
- Date Published:
- Journal Name:
- CHI PLAY '20: Extended Abstracts of the 2020 Annual Symposium on Computer-Human Interaction in Play
- Page Range / eLocation ID:
- 213 to 218
- Format(s):
- Medium: X
- Sponsoring Org:
- National Science Foundation
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- Free Publicly Accessible Full Text
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Accepted Manuscript
- Conference Paper:
- https://doi.org/10.1145/3383668.3419902
