Additional

Abstract

farm Abstract: StoryToy is a storytelling environment consisting of an audio replay engine and a tangible user interface based on a wireless sensor network. The implemented user interface has the form of a farm made out of cloth with stuffed animals as actors. In this report StoryToy is first compared with environments that support children’s own stories and with tangible interfaces for non-linear storytelling. Then several models for adding non-linear stories and games in the environment are proposed. Finally several stories and games that were created and tested in HomeLab on children of ages between two and six are discussed. Conclusions: StoryToy seems to be a toy with a lot of potential. The basic interaction of picking up the characters already enables many different stories and games. There are things that need to be improved but the fundamentals seem to work very well: The children enjoy the magical aspect of the animals working together without any visible technology and they like the games, and th