Hyperstories and Social Interaction in 2D and 3D Edutainment Spaces for Children

This paper presents FaTe2, an edutainment environment for children that combines a variety of paradigms: storytelling, hypertext, games, collaborative learning, and social interaction. FaTe2 provides a web based, multi-user, multi-dimension hyperspace, where children (aged 8-11) can meet, chat, play, and perform storytelling activities in collaboration. Small groups of kids - working both shoulder to shoulder and remotely - can explore together multimedia interactive stories rendered by means of 2D and 3D scenes; they can perform a variety of educational games and narrative activities; they can personalize scene elements and collaboratively create their own narrative flows, generating a multidimensional (i.e., 2D and 3D) hyperstory from the linear multimedia stories that are built-in in the system. The paper describes the background of FaTe2, its "child-centered" design (informed by field studies on kids' storytelling), and its implementation approach. We finally discuss how kids represent a challenging "category of target users" who may open new perspectives for hypertext practice and research.