21st Century Story Time

In a tiny corner of Nokia’s booth at CES was an exceedingly cute high-tech science project designed for children and their grandparents. Currently a prototype, the Family Story Play seeks “to improve communication across generations and over a distance, and to support parents and grandparents in fostering the literacy development of young children”. Created through a partnership between the Nokia Research Center and Sesame Workshop, this project combines Elmo with video conferencing to make story time something very different than when I was a kid.

Family Story Play uses a paper book with magnetic page identifiers, a sensor-enhanced frame, video conferencing technology, and video content of that Sesame Street Muppet kids seem to like these days. A complete setup includes one book/video conference device for the grandparents and another for a the child and their parents in a different location. That much hardware can’t be cheap, but hey, that’s what prototypes are for.

As the child turns the page, the system senses which page they are on and the corresponding interactive video plays. The grandparents using the other story book will also know what page the child has turned and how the video is responding. They can ask questions of their grandchild and interact with them and the book as if they were in the room at the same time. With two way video conferencing plus an interactive story book, the experience is quite unique–and that’s exactly what the Nokia Research Center was testing.

Beyond making the prototype technology, the team of researchers also studied the effects of using the technology on child learning and literacy. In a report that will be formally presented at the 2010 Conference on Human Factors in Computing Systems in Atlanta, Georgia, in April the team discovered that:

“Family Story Play improves child engagement in long-distance communication and increases the quality of interaction between young children and distant grandparents. Additionally, Family Story Play encourages dialogic [learning focused dialogue] reading styles that are linked with literacy development. Ultimately, reading with Family Story Play becomes a creative shared activity that suggests a new kind of collaborative story telling.”

Not bad for a cute little gadget, eh?

[Nokia Research Center and Family Story Play: Reading with Young Children (and Elmo) Over a Distance]