How was school today...? - Supporting narrative for non-speaking children, a feasibility study.

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Our goal is to develop a computer tool which helps children who cannot speak create a story about their day at school. Story telling is an essential aspect of social interaction, and story-telling skills are developed through practice. It is difficult for non-speaking children to get such practice, our tool will help them.More specifically, we want to use various kinds of sensors to acquire information about where the child went, what she did, and who she interacted with; write a computer program which automatically creates a draft story based on this data; and create a story editing and narration interface which lets children edit the draft story and then tell it when they are happy with it. Possible sensors include GPS for tracking where children go, RFID tags for tracking what objects children interact with and hence their activities; and barcode scanners for recording who children interact with. The story-generation software will be based on technology for generating English summaries of data which has been developed in other EPSRC-funded projects such as SumTime, RoadSafe, and BabyTalk. The story editing interface will probably be based on a visual timeline metaphor.Our work will be informed and guided by several user groups, including children, parents, and teachers. We will use a user-centred design philosophy throughout.We will build a simple prototype system at the end of the project, and do a small-scale evaluation with two children. If the feasibility study is successful, we will explore funding opportunities to further develop this concept.