Family story play: reading with young children (and elmo) over a distance

  • Authors:

  • Hayes Raffle;Rafael Ballagas;Glenda Revelle;Hiroshi Horii;Sean Follmer;Janet Go;Emily Reardon;Koichi Mori;Joseph Kaye;Mirjana Spasojevic

  • Affiliations:

  • Nokia Research Center , Palo Alto, CA, USA;Nokia Research Center , Palo Alto, CA, USA;Joan Ganz Cooney Center at Sesame Workshop, New York, NY, USA;Nokia Research Center, Palo Alto, CA, USA;MIT Media Lab, Cambridge, MA, USA;Nokia Research Center, Palo Alto, CA, USA;Sesame Workshop, New York, NY, USA;Nokia Research Center, Palo Alto, CA, USA;Nokia Research Center, Palo Alto, CA, USA;Nokia Research Center, Palo Alto, CA, USA

  • Venue:
  • Proceedings of the SIGCHI Conference on Human Factors in Computing Systems
  • Year:
  • 2010

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Abstract

We introduce Family Story Play, a system that supports grandparents to read books together with their grandchildren over the Internet. Family Story Play is designed to improve communication across generations and over a distance, and to support parents and grandparents in fostering the literacy development of young children. The interface encourages active child participation in the book reading experience by combining a paper book, a sensor-enhanced frame, video conferencing technology, and video content of a Sesame Street Muppet (Elmo). Results with users indicate that Family Story Play improves child engagement in long-distance communication and increases the quality of interaction between young children and distant grandparents. Additionally, Family Story Play encourages dialogic reading styles that are linked with literacy development. Ultimately, reading with Family Story Play becomes a creative shared activity that suggests a new kind of collaborative story telling.