EShadow: A Tool for Digital Storytelling Based on Traditional Greek Shadow Theatre Marios Christoulakis, Andreas Pitsiladis, Argiro Moraiti, Nektarios Moumoutzis and Stavros Christodoulakis Technical University of Crete University Campus Chania, 73100 Greece {christoulakis, pitsilad, argyro.moraiti, nektar, stavros} @ced.tuc.gr ABSTRACT Storytelling is a very common educational practice that is used in every level of education. In particular the use of storytelling in children education can have beneficiary results in the learning and creativity process of children. In this Note we present a storytelling tool inspired by the Greek traditional shadow theater. EShadow is a storytelling tool that can be used from both adults and children in order to create, record, share and watch digital shadow theater plays. It provides alternative methods for controlling the virtual puppets either through mouse or through a motion sensing controller. We present our findings from the use of eShadow in a children’s creativity exhibition and a field trial of eShadow in two elementary schools in Greece. Our findings illustrate that eShadow is very easy to use, attracts the interest of both children and teachers and has a positive impact on the development of children’s creativity. Keywords Storytelling; shadow theater; creativity; children; emotion; usability ACM Classification Keywords H.5.0. Information interfaces and presentation: General. General Terms Design; Experimentation; Verification. 1. INTRODUCTION Storytelling is a very common educational practice that is used in every level of education. Storytelling promotes children's learning, helps them organize their thoughts, extends their imagination and creativity, reinforces their collaboration skills as well as their writing, presentation, and problem-solving skills [1]. Storytelling is also an important tool for teachers because it can make difficult topics easier to understand, it provides them with the means to integrate multimedia content in the curriculum and helps them generate discussion topics in the class [1]. Shadow Theater is popular in many countries around the world like Greece, China, Taiwan, France, India, Turkey, Malaysia and others. Children in Greece watch traditional shadow theater plays, learn about shadow theater in school and play with shadow theater puppets. Shadow theater is a very popular element of Greek folklore. By exploiting this fact another possibility emerges: The enactment of intra-family communication scenarios that promote intergenerational bonding and playful learning. Imagine the following setting: a child, who lives in the United States of America, could present a shadow play story to his/her grandparents in Greece. The grandparents are able to watch and encourage him/her or even try to cooperate with him/her by controlling other virtual puppets on-line. Such kind of new opportunities for intergeneration bonding that overcomes the physical separation of children and their grandparents is important for children's development and contributes to the well-being of the elderly as well [2]. EShadow has been inspired by this combination of tradition, education and intra-family communication to offer a storytelling collaboration platform inspired by the Greek traditional shadow theater. The main goals of eShadow are: (a) to adapt traditional shadow theater in modern times; (b) to preserve traditional art as much as possible and make traditional shadow theater more popular; (c) to offer informal collaborative learning experiences for both children and adults; (d) to offer opportunities to children to express and improve their creativity; (e) to provide means for in school and out of school continuation of activities. With eShadow users can create, record, share and watch digital shadow theater plays. It provides alternative methods for controlling the virtual puppets either through mouse or through a motion sensing controller. EShadow also offers the ability to video chat for collaborative creation and watching of plays. The current eShadow prototype gives children and adults (teacher, parents etc.) the ability to create their own shadow theater plays, collaborate with each other for the creation of the play, share their creations and play with a motion sensing controller that resembles the traditional way of controlling shadow theater puppets. In the rest of the Note we will have an overview of related work followed by the detailed description of eShadow. Finally we present the findings from two field experiments where children used eShadow. 2. RELATED WORK AND ESHADOW OVERVIEW A very interesting approach for supporting children’s creativity and storytelling is proposed in [3] where children interacted with a robotic character and created stories. Another approach that is more relevant to eShadow is [4] where children control a virtual puppet with their bodies. Also a relevant system is Shadow Story