Ghostwriter: a narrative virtual environment for children

  • Authors:

  • Judy Robertson;Judith Good

  • Affiliations:

  • University of Edinburgh, Edinburgh;University of New Mexico, Albuquerque, NM

  • Venue:
  • Proceedings of the 2003 conference on Interaction design and children
  • Year:
  • 2003

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Abstract

Children find computer games extremely motivating and are often prepared to devote large amounts of leisure time to playing them. UK educational policy makers and practitioners have recently started to explore the educational potential of computer games and to consider how their motivational features can be harnessed within the curriculum. This paper describes a fully implemented virtual role-playing environment, Ghostwriter, designed for educational drama development and writing instruction. Ghostwriter was developed using the commercial game engine Unreal and therefore has the same high quality graphics and audio which children are accustomed to playing with at home. Two separate field studies with Ghostwriter have shown the educational value of the system and have confirmed that children are extremely motivated by it