What is it?

Teatrix appears in the scope of the NIMIS project. The objective of NIMIS was to develop a classroom for early learners (ages 6-10) where computers are integrated in such a way that are the less intrusive as possible in the environment.

Special furniture was developed to hide the computers from the young children and ease their interaction with them. A LCD tablet was incorporated into each classroom desk and the classical mouse input devices were substituted by pen based input.

Also a touch screen was introduced into the classroom in substitution to the old black board.

Besides the creation of this new classrom setting the project also aimed at the creation of software to support and extend where possible the classroom activities, mainly activites that engage chindren in the learning of writting and narrative skills.

Teatrix

Teatrix is a software application that runs in the NIMIS environment. Its main goal is to support the development of literacy skills in young children, namely writting and narrative skills. The target age of its users is 8-10 years a bit higher than the NIMIS target age, because of the necessary concepts such as second and third person perpective taking.

Teatrix is a 3D virtual environment for story creation that allows children to cooperate in the criation of their stories, each one taking the role a character, just like in real world performances.

The application reflects the experience gathered in the "O nosso sonho" elementary school. In this school chindren are used to prepare and perform theatre plays. From the observation of this process we conclude that the whole process is divided into three different phases:

1. Children first discuss what story are they going to play and what characters are needed to play it. The definition of a character is a very important issue here, as each young actor do his best to find the appropriate cloth and props to charactherize his character.

2. After the story has been decided the cast of young children start the performance. Teacher intervention is often needed here in order to the story to reach its end.

3. When performance is finished the public (if available) is called to comment on the performance of their collegues. Manytimes this comments are also ask to the performers themselves. A frequent task is to write the stoty that they just watch (or play).

For each of these three phases a different module of Teatrix was built, check the next links for more information about each module.


	Backstage	On Stage	The Audience