A significant proportion of the KidStory effort will be directed towards ensuring that full advantage is taken of opportunities for effective communication of project results. The following descibes the mechaninisms for this.

Participation in Research Communities

The research nature of KidStory and its broader objective are long term and sufficiently ambitious so that they cannot be fully realised in practical settings within the time scale or resources of the current proposal. Consequently, the research communities will be important targets for dissemination of project results. As well as traditional journal and conference outlets, some of the material placed on the World Wide Web will be aimed at this community. These will include reports of applied results alongside with more tentative ideas and attempts to generalise our results, so providing opportunities for critical feedback on the work of the project and input from the broader community.

Key conferences at which the partners have an established track record include: AERA (American Educator's Research Association), The European Conference for Research on Learning and Instruction and the ACM's CHI, CSCW and SIGGRAPH conferences.

Key journals where the partners have an established track record include: Cognition and Instruction, The European Journal of Psychology of Education, The International Journal of Science Education, and Learning and Instruction, and the Journal of Research into Educational Technology.

Allison Druin also writes a quarterly column on kids and computers for the ACM SIGCHI Bulletin (circ.6,000) and a yearly article on kids and technology for ACM Interactions magazine. She has been writing her column since 1997 and has been writing for Interactions since 1996.

Contacts with other ESE and more I3 projects

• use of narrative, e.g. storytelling, as a tool for learning;
• use of tangible interfaces, e.g. objects, other than common input devices for interaction;
• innovative use of displays, e.g. alternatives to desktop monitors;
• use of participatory design techniques for system development;
• increased role of affect in design and evaluations of systems.

We see the use of storytelling as the content of our systems for learning and seek to collaborate with the other storytelling ESE projects, Puppet and Pogo. This contact would involve the sharing of approach, background, lessons learned and we will seek ways we can build on the related work between the projects. We see this effort involving the sharing of documentation as well as the opportunity for study-visits as the projects develop. We also see a role for the pedagogical notions of temporality and spatiality in the Chronos and Choros (C3) project especially as KidStory progresses toward its second and third phases which will involve the incorporation of physical space in the design and interaction. Other possible contacts exist with the CARESS project because of its use of spatiality and unencumbered interaction.