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Me, My Character and the Others 199and so it was common to see two friends in close interaction inside thestory (and even forget their roles).Teacher intervention - the teacher was always present in all the performances.In the case of the younger group, the teacher had much moreactive interventions and control. Usually, the teacher played the role ofdirector and narrator of the story. Differently, the children in the oldergroup were able to play these roles by themselves (often, one of thecharacters would spontaneously turn into a kind of director), leading theteacher to the position of a spectator.Presence of audience - we observed performances with and without audience.On the one hand the audience provided a motivational factor andinfluenced the children’s performances (they wanted to show the othershow well they acted). On the other hand the audience played the role ofa distracting and sometimes perturbing factor.As a result of the observations, we decided to focus our research and developmentin the age group of 7 to 9. Further, from the observations we wereable to identify some features of children’s dramatic games, which served asfunctional elements in the design of Teatrix. Some of these features were:Phases- there are several phases in the dramatic games. The first phasethepreparation includes: story selection and discussion, selection of thecharacters and the choice of the actors and props. The second phase isthe acting itself. The final phase is a discussion phase about the performancedone.Action and use of props- children selected from their classroom severaldifferent objects that they used for the acting, ascribing them differentmeanings.Interaction between the children- we were able to distinguish two typesof interactions between children: (1) “performance level interactions”when children interact through their characters by their actions and sentences;and (2) “co-ordination interactions”, when children provide signalsto the others, give orders, make demands or simply inform the othersabout issues related with the ongoing play. Note that this type ofcoordination is done during the performance, as the play develops.3. Application: TeatrixTaking the results of our observations we developed Teatrix 2 which aimsat providing effective support for children developing their notions of narrativethrough the dramatisation of different situations (reflecting a participatorydesign approach taken in the NIMIS project - see [3]). Inspired by the ritual