Today, more teachers and parents are looking to computer technologies to support learning activities for their students and children. The difficulty that educators are finding is that these new technologies are not completely supportive of collaborative learning experiences. Three children can build a castle with a pile of blocks, but can those same three children share one mouse with one computer screen to build a virtual castle? KidStory sets out to address this problem by developing technologies that are as inherently collaborative as a box of crayons or a pile of blocks. Children need these manipulatives to enable them to focus on the creative experience of building, drawing, or storytelling as opposed to spending time concerned with which child gets to hold the mouse next. Inherent in the approach of KidStory is to supply tools that break away from the standard notion of mouse, keyboard and screen and take advantage of what both the virtual and physical worlds afford. KidStory proposes to develop new technologies that support collaborative learning which itself may underpin the development of storytelling and visualisation skills along with the development of multiple forms of literacy.

KidStory proposes to build applications which empower all partners, enabling each to interact through the computer at the same location or when at different locations. Such application tools must be sensitive to input from multiple simultaneous users, enable navigation by multiple simultaneous users, and support communication and collaboration strategies among local and remote users. Therefore, the goal of our research is to support early learning by adapting existing technologies as well as developing new technologies that will augment children's collaborative learning.