Introduction of Digital Storytelling in Preschool Education: a Case Study from Croatia

Our case study from Croatia showed the benefits of digital storytelling in a preschool as a basis for the formal ICT education. The statistical analysis revealed significant differences between children aged 6 – 7 who learned mathematics by traditional storytelling compared to those learning through digital storytelling. The experimental group that used digital storytelling showed significant improvement in their abilities to solve computational and mathematical problems, which suggests that this method was age-appropriate and versatile. Also, the observations of educators from both the experimental and the control group showed that children were more motivated by digital storytelling, succeeding to complete all stories with an incredible amount of engagement and enthusiasm. These findings indicate that interactive multimedia storytelling, compared to the traditional one, can be used as an effective tool for improving child’s mathematical and computer literacy skills in the preschool context in which ICT is being introduced for the first time

Interactive narration with a child: impact of prosody and facial expressions

International audienceIntelligent Virtual Agents are suitable means for interactive sto-rytelling for children. The engagement level of child interaction with virtual agents is a challenging issue in this area. However, the characteristics of child-agent interaction received moderate to little attention in scientific studies whereas such knowledge may be crucial to design specific applications. This article proposes a Wizard of Oz platform for interactive narration. An experimental study in the context of interactive story-telling exploiting this platform is presented to evaluate the impact of agent prosody and facial expressions on child participation during storytelling. The results show that the use of the virtual agent with prosody and facial expression modalities improves the engagement of children in interaction during the narrative sessions

An observational study of children interacting with an augmented story book

We present findings of an observational study investigating how young children interact with augmented reality story books. Children aged between 6 and 7 read and interacted with one of two story books aimed at early literacy education. The books pages were augmented using animated virtual 3D characters, sound, and interactive tasks. Introducing novel media to young children requires system and story designers to consider not only technological issues but also questions arising from story design and the design of interactive sequences. We discuss findings of our study and implications regarding the implementation of augmented story books

Oracy in the New Millennium: Storytelling revival in America and Bhutan

Video recording of presentations from the National Storytelling Conference in Bhutan, June 2009. Dr Joseph Sobol (East Tennessee State University) delivers a presentation on 'Oracy in the New Millennium: Storytelling revival in America and Bhutan'. This is followed by presentations delivered by Ap Degang, Ap Lobzang Yeshi and an unknown male.World Oral Literature Project: an urgent global initiative to document and make accessible endangered oral literatures before they disappear without record

Conversational Exploratory Search via Interactive Storytelling

Conversational interfaces are likely to become more efficient, intuitive and engaging way for human-computer interaction than today's text or touch-based interfaces. Current research efforts concerning conversational interfaces focus primarily on question answering functionality, thereby neglecting support for search activities beyond targeted information lookup. Users engage in exploratory search when they are unfamiliar with the domain of their goal, unsure about the ways to achieve their goals, or unsure about their goals in the first place. Exploratory search is often supported by approaches from information visualization. However, such approaches cannot be directly translated to the setting of conversational search. In this paper we investigate the affordances of interactive storytelling as a tool to enable exploratory search within the framework of a conversational interface. Interactive storytelling provides a way to navigate a document collection in the pace and order a user prefers. In our vision, interactive storytelling is to be coupled with a dialogue-based system that provides verbal explanations and responsive design. We discuss challenges and sketch the research agenda required to put this vision into life.Comment: Accepted at ICTIR'17 Workshop on Search-Oriented Conversational AI (SCAI 2017