Supporting young children learning to write stories together in a ''classroom of the future''
Paul Brna, Bridget Cooper · International Journal of Continuing Engineering Education and Life-Long Learning · 2002
This paper describes our approach to the development and deployment of a distributed software system (T'rrific Tales) designed to support collaborative story writing for children of 5-6 years of age. Children of this age generally find it difficult to work together - whether or not they are physically co-present or working with distributed applications. In addition, while children as young as four or five years old can have surprisingly good oral storytelling skills, when they begin to learn to write it takes some time before the qualities of their oral skills are mirrored in their written productions, and perhaps even more time before their proficiency with writing is good enough to demonstrate the strengths of the written medium for story telling. We illustrate the research issues within the context of NIMIS, a research project to design and evaluate a "classroom of the future".