“Jabberstamp: embedding sound and voice in traditional drawings” by Raffle, Vaucelle, Wang and Ishii

Children in our culture are accustomed to creating people and things and places—with implied context —in their drawings. Since the fi rst days they draw, parents will ask “who is that? Where are they? What are they doing?” From early on, children have learned through drawing to provide the information necessary for an audience to understand the story that is going on in their drawing. Conversely, learning how to contextualize an oral or written story in the absence of images is a much slower learning process for children, and children’s ability to use language to communicate when and where their story takes place is considered a milestone in literacy development [Snow 1983].

Literacy education encompasses reading and writing, but most tools for literacy development address children’s reading skills. Tangibles have been argued to support children’s creative expression [Ryokai et al, 2004], and we are inspired to develop new technologies that leverage children’s creativity and existing knowledge to make story creation, comprehension, and communication part of a child’s ongoing intellectual life [Graves et al. 2004]. Our research builds on a history of interactive systems to support children’s literacy through storytelling and drawing.