Searching for Count Whistleboy

An Exploration of Story Creation through Design Research with Kids

Expressing oneself through stories is a fundamental part of childhood learning and social development. The process of making and telling a story is often collaborative and social, as children play with each other's ideas and with ideas from popular media in the process of expressing themselves and creating a shared world. During this design research project, we spent eight weeks working with fifth grade children at a local elementary school in order to explore ideas that would satisfy our participants' requirements for an online, collaborative tool for creating stories, sharing them with others, and accessing other storytellers as resources for ideas and inspiration.