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Fantasy play and storytelling serve an important role in young children's development. While computers are increasingly present in the world of young children, there is a lack of computational systems that support children's voice in everyday storytelling, particularly in the context of fantasy play. This paper introduces StoryMat, a system that supports children's own voice in their own storytelling play. StoryMat offers a child-driven play space by recording and recalling children's narrating voices, and the movements they make with their toys on the mat. Empirical research with children showed that StoryMat fostered developmentally advanced forms of storytelling and provided a space where children engaged in fantasy storytelling collaboratively with or without a playmate. The paper addresses the importance of supporting children's fantasy play and suggests a new way for technology to play an integral part in that activity. Keywords: Storytelling, young children, interactive narrati...

Collaborative fantasy play and storytelling serve an important role in preschool children's development. Making up characters and telling stories are activities through which children make sense of and test out their hypotheses about the world. While computers are increasingly present to support young children's collaboration in school tasks, there is a lack of computational systems to support children's voice in this kind of important collaborative activity. StoryMat is a system that supports children's collaborative fantasy play and storytelling. With StoryMat, however, collaboration can take place among co-present peers, or between a child and a previous user, mediated by the StoryMat. StoryMat records and recalls children's own narrating voices, and the movements they make with their toys on the mat. Stories from the past are conjured up on the mat as a narrating moving shadow of the toy, when they are triggered by the present stories that are similar. By hearing peer stories in re...

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Finding a useful abstract representation is fundamental to solving many difficult problems in software engineering. In order to better understand how representations are actually used in key collaborative software engineering tasks, this empirical study examined all of the spoken representations of soflware behavior in 9 domain analysis sessions. It found that about 70 % of them were metaphorical, representing system behavior as physical movement of objects, as perceptual processes, or in anthropomorphic terms ascribing beliefs and desires to the system. The pattern of use of these representations indicates 1) that they were not merely temporary placeholders, but rather their use persisted even when a specialized and more formal vocabulary had been developed, and 2) the metaphoric descriptions appear to reflect actual use of metaphor, rather than just a choice of vocabulary. The use of metaphor is explained in terms d how well they serve human cognitive abilities and collaborative needs. The predominance of metaphorical representations in synchronous collaborative sessions raises important issues about the possible misleading effects of metaphorical thinking. It also raises questions about the compatibility of the spoken representations with other representations (e.g., diagrams, specification languages) that trigger, and capture the results of, the verbal collaborative work.

The definition of disorder as a harmful dysfunction (J. C. Wakefield, 1999) is a useful concept, anchored in the recognition that the evolved human architecture consists of a collection of functional mechanisms that may potentially be impaired and whose impairment may be harmful. Because natural selection organized each mechanism to solve a distinct adaptive problem under ancestral conditions, the criteria for whether a mechanism is dysfunctional are supplied by whether the mechanism has become impaired in performing its ancestral function. Because evolutionary function and dysfunction diverge markedly from normal human standards of value, many dysfunctions are beneficial, whereas various mechanisms that are performing their evolved function may cause disturbing outcomes. For this reason, many conditions in addition to disorders may require treatment, and the authors attempt to sketch an evolutionary taxonomy of treatable conditions. Abnormal psychology has two distinct but related identities: (a) as an essentially medical discipline concerned with the study, diagnosis, and treatment of psychological conditions that may invite treatment, and (b) as the scientific study of psychological phenomena that fall outside the range of normal mental function-

Abstract: Most research on electronic play has focused on its possible negative effects for children and adolescents, and contextual factors such as socioeconomic status (SES) and culture are rarely considered. This article considers the potential benefits of electronic play from a psychological perspective, as well as individual and contextual factors that may shape the influence of electronic play for children and adolescents. Demographics of players and the games themselves are presented, and recommendations for research and policy are discussed.

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and the Three Guineas Trust, during the period of this work. Part of this review is reprinted from Baron-Cohen et al (in press, Journal of Neurology and Neurosurgery). 1 Autism is diagnosed when a child or adult has abnormalities in a ‘triad ’ of behavioural domains: social development, communication, and repetitive behaviour/obsessive interests (APA, 1994; ICD-10, 1994). Autism can occur at any point on the IQ continuum, and IQ is a strong predictor of outcome (Rutter, 1978). Autism is also invariably accompanied by language delay (no single words before 2 years old). Asperger Syndrome (AS) (Asperger, 1944) is a subgroup on the autistic spectrum. People with AS share many of the same features as are seen in autism, but with no history of language delay and where IQ is in the average range or above. The main cognitive theories of autism are summarised next: Cognitive theories a. The Mindblindness theory The mindblindness theory of autism (Baron-Cohen, 1995) proposed that in autism

Acknowledgements: SBC, JH, and RG were supported by the MRC during the period of this work. SW was supported by the McDonnell-Pew Trust. JL was supported by the Isaac Newton Trust. We are also grateful for support from the Shirley Foundation. Parts