Characterizing the research-practice gap in children’s interactive storytelling systems

Storytelling support has been and continues to be a recurring theme in child–computer interaction research, especially as it pertains to education. This work has spilled over into practice, and, in the last few decades, a large number of storytelling systems for children have been developed—both as research prototypes and commercial applications. However, through a systematic analysis of 75 research-based storytelling systems and 39 commercial systems, we find that there remains a problematic gap between research and practice with respect to products in interactive storytelling and child–computer interaction, echoing the well-documented research-practice gap in the general HCI field. We characterize the nature of this gap, highlighting design themes promoted by research-based systems that are not as prevalent in commercial systems, such as tangibility and narrative scaffolds, and vice-versa. Understanding the main areas of discrepancy between research and practice can help focus efforts to close the research-practice gap in storytelling systems for children.