In this pictorial, we describe a user study carried out with a group of 20 first graders (ages 6-7). The aim of the study was to investigate if it is possible to infer children's engagement with technology by looking at their drawings. The analyses of children's drawings was informed by the Grammar of Visual Design (GVD) and the results evidence that children's drawings provided valuable insights, helping to understand children's engagement and involvement with the tool. Applying the GVD to inform the analytical process reduced subjective interpretations of children's drawings. As such, this work adds evidence to the body of knowledge that seeks to validate more reliable methods to assess children's opinion in user studies.

We present M&M, a digitally enhanced narrative environment for children that resulted from the collaborative projects Monnom and Mobeybou. M&M aims at offering children open-ended interaction scenarios to collaboratively create narratives through their bodily movements, voices, and the use of physical objects in space. M&M consists of sensors that collect data from the physical environment, an operating system that transforms the collected data into digital visualisations, and a projection that displays the output of the narration. In the physical environment, children can use objects and move with them to interact with the digital narrative elements. By interacting with the story elements, children connect with different cultures and environments, in an intercultural embodied storytelling experience.

Abstract We present and discuss the concept ‘narrating by doing’ as the process of creating narratives by performing different embodied actions with tangible interfaces for storytelling. We characterize it as a ‘bridging concept’ that can facilitate exchange between theory and design, informing research and design of TUIs for storytelling targeting young children. The concept builds on theories of cognition, learning and narration, specifically drawing upon the following perspectives: Constructionism, Socio-Constructivism, Embodied Cognition, Narratology and The Narrative Practice Hypothesis. Building upon these theoretical foundations, we identify and discuss four ‘design articulations’ (i.e. important parameters that express the qualities of the concept), namely communicative situation, narrative function of the tangible objects, collaborative and embodied actions and the narrator’s position. Finally, we add evidence to the concept and discuss its productiveness by presenting a set of considerations to inform the design of tangible interfaces for storytelling.