The Networked Interactive Media in Schools (NIMIS) project is an EU funded project based in three countries, which has designed and evaluated a classroom of the future for infants. The Computer Based Learning Unit at Leeds University, in conjunction with teachers and children has developed an application, ‘T'rrific Tales’, which allows children of age 5-6 years to co-construct a multi-frame cartoon to help storywriting with the help of an empathic agent. In this paper we discuss the factors that promote creativity and how the design of T'rrific Tales, used in the NIMIS classroom, is intended to help children be creative and includes the positive early results of our analysis of the stories told by the children. Context This paper considers issues involved in the software development in one area of a European project, which is developing a “classroom of the future” for primary children situated in three European schools one each in Portugal and Germany and England. The NIMIS project, (Networked Interactive Media in Schools) has several interwoven aims, technological, cognitive, and social, embedded in its conception. Central to the project’s aims is the smooth interaction between human and electronic communication, the digital complementing and facilitating the human. The project team envisages the marrying of co -operative technologies with intelligent ones such as “anthropomorp hic” agents and uses high technology interfaces (a large 50 inch touch screen and Wacom PL-300 tablets) in a real classrooms, with three different applications designed to encourage literacy and creative writing. Children are able to share and jointly create multimedia stories, exchange ideas, text pictures and sound. This paper looks at software being developed in the English school with which children can create cartoon-style stories using pictures, sound and text with the help of an agent. The paper is an extended version of one published on CD ROM as the proceedings of ISSEI 2000, Bergen, Norway (Brna & Cooper, 2000).
['Bridget Cooper', 'Paul Brna']
Fostering Cartoon-Style Creativity with Sensitive Agent Support in Tomorrow's Classroom