STORYTELLING GOES MULTIMEDIA!
An interactive integrated system for story-creation and multimedia storytelling dedicated to young children of 4-10 years old. i-Theatre is a unique learning system for early years and primary aged children that facilitates story-creation and multimedia storytelling in a way that embraces both traditional and digital mediums. First children create the characters, backgrounds, and other content for their stories using traditional mediums such as paper, pencils, markers, paint etc.
Meet the i-Theatre
A complete digital learning environment
Imagine a pre-school classroom producing their own digital stories. Surrounding a colourful tangible laboratory, a small team of young authors are creating an animated movie by arranging their own drawings, objects and narratives. By enabling child-to-child symbolic play and collaboration, i-Theatre turns picture artefacts into digital videos, supporting children development from passive media consumers, to creative multimedia producers.
Step-by-step guide on how to create and share a multimedia story with i-Theatre:
- Create the characters, backgrounds, and other content for stories using traditional mediums such as paper, pencils, markers, etc.
- Convert hardcopy materials to digital content using i-Theatre’s built-in scanner.
- Animate and narrate by manipulating content on screen and recording sounds and narration.
- Watch and Share stories using the touch screen or a projector and export with a dedicated USB drive.
How it works
Children draw the backgrounds and cut out the characters of their story using paper and materials, working alone or in group. A storyboard can also be created for experienced groups. At this point, they transform their creations into digital form using the scanner-drawer and pushing the import button.
Children can manipulate the imported character shapes with a very simple gesture vocabulary (move, rotate, zoom), while the background remains still. After setting the stage, all they need to do is press the ‘record’ button and tell the story, narrating with their own voices and moving the characters on the screen.
When the story is finished, it can be watched as a movie on the touch screen or projected on a larger screen to be shared ‘cinema style’. The finished movie can be easily stored in a child’s personal file for future use or it can be exported to be watched on any electronic device, by using a dedicated USB. Children can share their creations inside the school, offer them to friends as a gift, to their parents, or maybe even their grandparents.
Scene Recording Boxes
Coloured boxes that store a single animated movie. Each box has an input and an output which allows scenes to be connected in the sequence of a story.
Personal container
A physical object for storage, representing a tactile equivalent of a “folder” common in windows-based software. When a child places their wooden shape (cube, sphere, etc…) on the scanner, i-Theatre opens their unique folder of content on the touch screen.
Function Cards
Supplied as tactile durable cards, function card allow children to access common computing functions with minimal adult supervision. Functions include; cut, paste, delete, background, import-export, and configuration.
Learning frameworks and curriculum
The collaborative nature of storytelling combined with i-Theatre’s mix of digital and tangible elements allows children to: “resource their own learning through connecting with people, place, technologies and natural and processed materials”
Ready For a Fusion of Tech and Tales? Let’s Chat.
i-Theatre is your technology entirely tailored for children and their educational needs towards all learning goals.
