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StoryCube: supporting children’s storytelling with a tangible tool

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Abstract

Storytelling is one of the effective methods used in education. Computer-aided storytelling allows children to create more free-form stories and provides a large amount of story materials. Grounded in the current related works, we design a tangible interactive tool, which supports children to interact with virtual objects via a tangible way instead of the usage of mouse/keyboard. With this tool, we also develop a storytelling system called StoryCube where children are able to create a 3D story environment and accomplish story narrations through physical manipulations to different virtual characters. From a preliminary user study, we find StoryCube full of playfulness, easy to learn and use, and somehow inspire children in storytelling activities.

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Acknowledgements

This research is supported by the National Natural Science Foundation of China under Grant No. 60970090 and No. 61272325, the Major State Basic Research Development Program of China (973 Program) under Grant No. 2013CB328805, the Frontier Project of the Knowledge Innovation of Chinese Academy of Sciences under Grant No. ISCAS 2009-QY03 and the Cooperation Projects of Guangdong Province and Chinese Academy of Sciences under Grant No. 2011B090300086. We would like to acknowledge the support of Tianyuan Gu, Tingting Wang, Li Shen, and Cheng Zhang. We thank the teachers and students in Kindergarten of Chinese Academy of Sciences for their cooperation and the reviewers for their constructive comments.

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Authors and Affiliations

  1. Intelligence Engineering Lab, Institute of Software Chinese Academy of Sciences, Beijing, China

    Danli Wang, Liang He & Keqin Dou

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  1. Danli Wang
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  2. Liang He
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  3. Keqin Dou
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Correspondence to Danli Wang.

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Wang, D., He, L. & Dou, K. StoryCube: supporting children’s storytelling with a tangible tool. J Supercomput 70, 269–283 (2014). https://doi.org/10.1007/s11227-012-0855-x

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