Values Impacting the Design of an Adaptive Educational StorybookIntroductionVisionValuesDiscussionSummaryReferencesValues Impacting the Design of an AdaptiveEducational StorybookJason B. Alonso, Angela Chang, and Cynthia BreazealMIT Media Lab20 Ames St, Cambridge, MA 02139{jalonso,anjchang,cynthiab}@media.mit.eduAbstract. We present an adaptive educational narrative that combinesan interactive storybook with drama management. By understandingour underlying value system, we are able to create an adaptive narrativethat provides features adequate for the target context. Our value systemand design needs invite a reexamination and reapplication of interactivestorytelling systems, and results in an adaptive narrative framework thatis both feasible and extensible to a wide range of experiences.Keywords: Interactive narrative, drama management, design values,early childhood education, design process.1 IntroductionStorytelling, especially in early childhood, combines learning techniques withfantasy play and artistic expression. In emergent literacy, when children arejust learning to read for the first time, parents are the first educators, guidingtheir children through shared reading behaviors to introduce them to story, art,and print [3]. Parents are observant guides, providing responsive and intelligentencouragement and demonstration in the learning process for their children. Wehave designed and implemented storytelling software to assist in this learningprocess, as an assistant that unobtrusively prompts the readers to engage instorytelling practice [1]. The criticality of learning at this young age however,compels us to examine our presentation of material to children [4]—in our case,this is manifest in the nature and choice of interactive narrative framework.In this paper, we lay out a vision for a learning tool and our values (informedby principles in early childhood education) that guide our design choices.2 VisionWe envision interactive storybooks that grow as their authors continue to ex-pand their materials (cloud storytelling) at the same time that they learn fromtheir usage patterns to improve their performance for individuals (adaptive sto-rytelling). Our vision is inspired from fiction, especially the illustrated primerfrom Stephenson’s The Diamond Age [5], yet it builds upon prior work.M. Si et al. (Eds.): ICIDS 2011, LNCS 7069, pp. 350–353, 2011.c Springer-Verlag Berlin Heidelberg 2011Values Impacting the Design of an Adaptive Educational Storybook 351Fig. 1. Parent-child discussions prompted by TinkRBookCloud TinkRBook is a project building upon TinkRBook [2] and Dramamatic,an interactive narrative engine we are building for use in Cloud TinkRBook andother projects. A TinkRBook is an interactive storybook that allows users toexplore how text changes in response to user interactions with story elementswithin a story context. The system is designed to promote parent-child discussion,as in Figure 1.We envision a system that draws its resources from the cloud (that is, itsauthors, who may be many, continually expand its body of story resources) withthe intention that it has an ever growing body of resource from which to tellstories. As such, it will need an intelligent system to help each person find thestory that is relevant to them. As this intelligence is fundamentally an interactivenarrative system, Cloud TinkRBook is an adaptive educational narrative thatcombines an interactive storybook with drama management.3ValuesBy explicitly articulating the values for our design, we constrain the problemof designing an adaptive educational narrative1. Obviously, designing explicitlyfor children requires awareness of the cognitive abilities of young and beginningreaders. Other considerations arise from empathizing with the other stakeholdersin developing the experience, such as parents and story creators. Parents areusually the mediators for the book, and we are interested in providing somebenefit to them for reading an adaptive narrative to their child. Story creators,who may be educators, artists, or authors, need to have a way to express theirideas to accomplish their educational and experiential goals.We use the aesthetic values summarized in Table 1 to guide our design of aninteractive storytelling system (outlined in the same table).4 DiscussionOur design criteria, including our vision for Cloud TinkRBook and our val-ues, present interesting challenges for interactive narrative systems and their1Our decision to articulate values stems from a movement in the Interaction Designand Children (IDC) community to make values underlying design explicit [6].352 J.B. Alonso, A. Chang, and C. BreazealTable 1. Impact of values on design choicesValue Design ChoiceLeveragingexisting ritual– use of explicit page turning buttons– use of tablet form to promote physical proximity– semantic highlighting in response to strumming of wordsDevelopmentalAppropriateness– avoiding text in menus and complex HCI interactionparadigms (e.g. checkboxes, sliders, double-click)– concise and simple text– choice (decision points) are explicitly offered through narra-tive text layout or interactive graphic elements– multisensory interaction: every touch on an active story ele-ment responds with sound or animation– modular scene-based story structure– small world containing educational objective within eachscene– immediately observable (short) causal links in the narrativeAddressingthe Dual Audience– providing demonstrable swapping of words to demonstratenarrative flexibility– customization of narrative and story presentation over repeatreadingsinterfaces. In particular, we needed our educational concepts to prevail over in-teractive narrative structure, and existing systems did not fit our value system.In our review of systems, which we do not present in this paper, we found ourwork has a few notable differences from other systems.Interactive storybooks may treat time as an explicit decision. How do we representtime? What does “going back” mean? In TinkRBook, when the user goes back apage, they are not going back in time as they would with a paper storybook. Thestate of the world and character remains consistently in the now, with the pagesproviding spatial distance between scenes. Choices made in a frame are generallyreversible, meaning that the user can usually change a decision by revisiting the ap-propriate scene, and the implications of the change will