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Me, My Character and the Others 203However, after some sessions with this first version children started to demandmore understanding on what was really happening in the story. Also,they would ask aloud their peers about what was happening. In general, theydemanded some higher degree of control over their characters. They wantedto better understand what the characters meant when performing a certain behaviour.To respond to their demands we introduced a new type of control overthe characters.The idea was to offer the children with the possibility to reflect upon theircharacters’ behaviours at story creation time and control that behaviour. Thismeta level of control is implemented as a tool called the “Hot-Seating”, whichgives the children the possibility to freeze the story time, put themselves intotheir characters’ shoes and explain the character’s behaviours [2]. When a childenters the “Hot-Seating” she is asked to answer a set of questions concerningthe behaviour of the character. Such justifications are then shared with all theother children in the same virtual play.These reflection moments may happen at the child’s demand or when the applicationdetects that a character is not in character (see [4] for further details).With this tool we aimed at providing the children with more information aboutthe story, which, we believed, would lead to a richer type of collaboration.We have installed a new version of Teatrix in the school and so far the resultsare quite positive. In spite of the fact that in the first two weeks children tendedto ignore the reflection moments (even if triggered by the system), in the lastcouple of weeks they started to use more often the reflection tool and to justifytheir character’s behaviour. So the “Hot-Seating” was easily understood.However, we still haven’t found any significant results that establish a relationbetween the presence of the “Hot-Seating” and the quality of collaborationestablished between peers in the same virtual play.6. Final RemarksThis chapter provided an overview of some of the design decisions takenin the construction of Teatrix, a collaborative virtual environment for storycreation by young children. We described results of the observations madewith children performing dramatic games, and, based on these observationswe introduced a new approach for character control and communication inTeatrix.