Publication Data
Designing for children's mobile storytelling
Abstract: Mobile technologies offer novel opportunities for children
to express themselves in-context, seamlessly, without disrupting the flow of their
formal learning activities or informal play. Most contemporary mobile devices are
equipped with multimedia support that can be used to create multimodal stories that
represent the rich life narratives children experience, imagine, and want to share. The
authors investigated these issues over a 9-month series of participatory design
sessions in the Human Computer Interaction Lab (HCIL) at the University of Maryland. In
this article, the authors describe their work with children in designing mobile tools
for story creation and collaboration. Throughout this work, they asked the following
questions: What stories do children want to tell, and how do they want to convey them
in a mobile context? The findings suggest the need for mobile technology-based
applications that support children’s unique storytelling habits, particularly
interruptability and multimodality.
