Narrative-Centered Computing for Childhood Environmental Awareness

该项目旨在为以叙述为中心的计算（NCC）创建一个框架，帮助孩子们更有效地推理(a)调解环境变化的分布式因果链，以及(b)他们如何有效地干预这些链。NCC框架从一种叫做时空锚定的计算讲故事的新机制开始。时空锚定的故事不是由线性的“电影条”组成，而是由故事节点组成的网络。每个节点描绘了整个情节的一个小元素，并锚定在空间和时间的特定位置。为了推进故事，用户探索相关时空场所的丰富地理表征，发现故事节点和它们之间的相互联系。因为节点可以固定在不同的时空分辨率水平上，并以非线性的方式相互联系，探索这些叙述将有助于儿童发展更细致入微的能力，以推理分布式因果关系和可变尺度。这些能力反过来将转化为更有效地参与环境问题。该项目专注于教育的一个特定主题，旨在开发一种新的信息技术方法，以提高人类的认知能力。我们全球环境困境的一个显著特征是问题的广度与人类目前有限的反应之间的差异。这种脱节可能反映了我们直觉认知和情感过程的潜在局限性。作为适应“人类大小”的复杂性和因果关系的生物，我们缺乏有效的方法来推理驱动环境现象的各种时间、空间和社会分布的相互作用。这项创新的研究试图解决这个问题，并通过关注我们与故事联系的实质性能力来克服我们在对分布式数据进行推理时的困难。NCC框架还包括新的交互机制，通过这种机制，用户可以通过现实世界中的目标行为影响故事世界中正在展开的事件。这些机制将让孩子们看到他们自己的环境相关的行为模式，由直觉上可理解的因果映射介导，如何在故事生态系统中引起积极或消极的变化。用户的行为和展开的故事之间的反馈将对儿童环境责任感的发展产生强有力的影响。驱动这些相互作用机制的数据也将提供评估本研究有效性的自然手段。作为测试和完善NCC框架的一种方式，该研究将包括创建一个试验台交互式叙事，将在网上部署，并作为临时科学博物馆展览。这个故事将使用时空锚定以及视频和传统电影技术来戏剧化发生在一个具有代表性的加州生态系统中的相互作用，例如，海獭，海带森林和海胆都相互作用的海洋环境。将通过上述数据收集机制以及与用户的访谈来评估这种叙述的行为影响和教育效果。本研究通过开发一种新的方法将复杂的分布式现象嵌入到交互式叙述格式中，将对以人为中心的计算做出重大贡献。这里开发的时空锚定技术不仅在当前环境系统的背景下有用，而且在各种其他领域也很有用，例如正式教学法（例如，用于理解其他STEM主题的交互式叙述），社交网络，游戏（例如，玩家创建故事节点以推动情节的大型多人游戏世界）和个人信息架构（例如，地理锚定的个人生活史设备）。通过关注儿童作为目标受众，这项研究也将对以儿童为中心的计算的新兴领域做出实质性的贡献。特别是，这项工作将为进一步研究如何使用故事和叙事来创建甚至非常小的孩子也可以很容易地使用的计算系统奠定基础。该系统的环境主题也将符合国家和加利福尼亚州的科学教育指导方针，从而使它有可能广泛应用于正式的课堂环境以及家庭和科学博物馆等非正式的学习环境。

This project seeks to create a framework for narrative-centered computing (NCC) that will help children reason more effectively about (a) the distributed chains of causation that mediate environmental change, and (b) how they can intervene effectively within those chains. The NCC framework begins with a new mechanism for computational storytelling called spatiotemporal anchoring. Spatiotemporally anchored stories consist not of a linear "filmstrip," but instead of a network of story nodes. Each node depicts a small element of the overall plot, and is anchored to a specific location in space and time. To advance the story, users explore a rich geographical representation of the relevant spatiotemporal locale, discovering story nodes and the interconnections between them. Because nodes can be anchored at variable levels of spatiotemporal resolution and interlinked in non-linear ways, exploring these narratives will help children to develop more nuanced abilities for reasoning about distributed causation and variable scale. These abilities, in turn, will translate into more effective engagement with environmental issues. While focusing on a particular topic in education, this project seeks to develop a new information technology method for enhancing human cognitive abilities in general. A striking feature of our global environmental predicament is the disparity between the breadth of the problem and the limited nature of humanity's current response. This disconnection may reflect underlying limitations on our intuitive cognitive and emotional processes. As organisms that are adapted to "humansized" scales of complexity and causation, we lack effective means for reasoning about the kinds of temporally, spatially, and socially distributed interactions that drive environmental phenomena. This innovative research seeks to address this problem and to overcome our difficulties in reasoning about distributed data by focusing instead upon our substantial ability to connect to stories.The NCC framework also includes novel interaction mechanisms through which users can influence unfolding events in a story world via targeted behaviors in the real world. These mechanisms will allow children to see how their own environmentally relevant patterns of behavior, mediated by intuitively understandable causal mappings, could cause positive or negative changes in a story ecosystem. This feedback between user's actions and the unfolding story will have powerful implications for children's developing sense of environmental responsibility. The data that drives these interaction mechanisms will also provide a natural means of evaluating the effectiveness of this research. As a way of testing and refining the NCC framework, the research will include the creation of a testbed interactive narrative, to be deployed online and as a temporary science museum exhibit. This narrative will use spatiotemporal anchoring along with video and traditional cinematographic techniques to dramatize the interactions that take place within a representative California ecosystem, for example, a marine environment in which sea otters, kelp forests, and sea urchins all interact. The behavioral impact and educational effectiveness of this narrative will be evaluated both via the aforementioned data collection mechanisms as well as through interviews with users. This research will make a significant contribution to Human-Centered Computing by developing a novel approach to embedding complex distributed phenomena in an interactive narrative format. The spatiotemporal anchoring technique developed here will be useful not just in the context of the present environmental system, but in a variety of other domains such as formal pedagogy (e.g., interactive narratives for understanding other STEM topics), social networking, games (e.g., massively multiplayer worlds in which players create story nodes to drive the plot), and personal information architecture (e.g., a geographically-anchored personal life history device). By focusing on children as the target audience, this research will also make substantial contributions to the emerging domain of child-centered computing. In particular, this work will lay the foundation for further investigation into how story and narrative can be used to create computational systems that even very young children can readily utilize. The environmental themes of the system will also conform to both national and California state guidelines for science education, thus giving it the potential to be broadly deployed in formal classroom settings as well as in informal learning contexts such as homes and science museums.