SAGE Storytellers: Learning about Identity, Language and Technology

Abstract

This paper emphasizes the counseling and self-awareness possibilities of storytelling by presenting a new type of computational storytelling authoring environment, SAGE (Storytelling Agent Generation Environment), that allows children to design their own sage storyteller agents, create their own data-bases of inspirational stories and interact with them. Many new technological tools enable people to learn about the outer world. SAGE explicitly aims to enable children to explore their inner world, developing a better sense of who they are and a set of values for constructing their role in the world. On one hand, by constructing their own storyteller agents children start to explore the dynamics of storytelling and the complexity of meaning and interpretation in communication. On the other hand, the need for formalizing in the computer the flow of the conversational interaction and the turn-taking rules, allows them to play with powerful computational ideas.