"How was School Today…?", Evaluating the Personal-Narrative-Telling Prototype: Preliminary Results

Talking about your day at school can be essential for family interaction and this narrative communication has been highlighted for its role in literacy acquisition. In a one year feasibility study we explored whether we can support children with complex communication needs (CCN) to create and tell stories about their school day with the help of a computer tool which uses data from the user's activities during the day. We have built a prototype system that generates draft stories about a child's day at school using interaction and location sensors, pre-stored information about the school day such as the timetable and lunch menu and recorded voice messages from staff. The child can easily edit the generated stories and use them integrated in her personal voice output communication aid (VOCA). We will present preliminary results from the evaluation of the system in a special school. Extended Abstract Talking about your day at school can be essential for family interaction and this kind of narrative interaction has been highlighted for its role in literacy acquisition (Peterson, Jesso and McCabe 1999). However, as most children can do this naturally, telling stories about oneself can be a real struggle for people with complex communication needs (CCN); they find it very difficult to create and to articulate such stories. Current augmentative and alternative communication (AAC) technology available is generally not designed to support personal narrative.