TellTaleMike Ananny, Jean Barnwell, Professor Justine Cassell, and Professor Hiroshi Ishii / 2001
TellTale is a story
construction kit for children. Its goal is to help youngsters create and experiment
with the structure and content of oral language in way similar to how written
text is composed. The design consists of a number of modular body components and
one head piece that are used to record and play audio segments created by a child,
or by several children. The body parts can contain stories or story fragments
that can be combined in different orders to create new narrative configurations,
letting children experiment with plot, transitions, endings, beginnings — basically,
anything they can imagine. In essence, it’s a “tangible story processor” for children
who have stories to tell but who might not yet have the skills necessary to communicate
their ideas in writing. User studies suggest that TellTale’s segmented structure
helps children use body pieces as “linguistic containers.” They oral stories they
compose with TellTale are indicative of later written literacy skills: they are
longer, more cohesive (with fewer disfluencies and more conjunctive phrases) and
contain “better formed” beginnings and endings than stories created with a non-segmented
interface.