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In the context of a pandemic that has had wide-ranging negative impacts on preschool children’s socioemotional development it is important to consider uses of technology to support children re-engaging socially with peers. In this article, we review the landscape of systems to support children’s face-to-face collaboration and identify an underexplored approach that could be well suited for the current context: using technology in a peripheral role to support activities where the focus is on other children and non-electronic objects and where children are free to engage with the physical space around them with the support of adults. We then present a pre-pandemic evaluation of StoryCarnival, a system with these underexplored characteristics, designed to support preschool children’s sociodramatic play, for which there is evidence of numerous benefits that can positively impact children’s socioemotional development. The results of the evaluation comparing sociodramatic play with and without StoryCarnival’s support suggest that while not being the focus of the activity, StoryCarnival’s components changed the dynamics of play for the children in the study during our observations, such that children displayed more mature play characteristics. Our discussion includes implications for child-computer interaction and considerations for the pandemic context.
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Stories and Voice Agents to Inspire Preschool Children's Social Play: An Experience with StoryCarnival: Inspiring Preschool Children's Social Play
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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- PAR ID:
- 10440958
- Date Published:
- Journal Name:
- IDC '23: Proceedings of the 22nd Annual ACM Interaction Design and Children Conference
- Page Range / eLocation ID:
- 543 to 547
- Format(s):
- Medium: X
- Sponsoring Org:
- National Science Foundation
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- Free Publicly Accessible Full Text
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Accepted Manuscript1.0
- Conference Paper:
- https://doi.org/10.1145/3585088.3593893
