Building KidPad: An Application for Children's Collaborative Storytelling
Building KidPad: An Application for Children's Collaborative Storytelling
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Date
2003-06-04
Authors
Hourcade, Juan Pablo
Bederson, Benjamin B.
Druin, Allison
Advisor
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Abstract
Collaborating in small groups can be beneficial to children's learning and
socializing. However, there is currently little computer support for
children's collaborative activities. This was our motivation for
building KidPad, a collaborative storytelling tool for children. KidPad
provides children with drawing, typing, and hyperlinking capabilities in a
large, two-dimensional canvas. It supports collaboration by accepting
input from multiple mice. In building KidPad, we developed solutions to
problems common to all single-display groupware applications for children:
obtaining input from multiple devices, and using an intuitive user
interface metaphor that can support collaboration. Our solution for
obtaining input from multiple devices was MID, an architecture written in
Java. We addressed the need for an appropriate user interface metaphor byusing the local tools metaphor. This paper describes our work on MID and
local tools in the context of building of KidPad, and aims to provide
developers with valuable insights into how to develop collaborative
applications for children.
(UMIACS-TR-2003-44)
(HCIL-2003-18)