Children as Active Partners: Strategies for Collaboration in Spatial Tasks through Virtual Worlds

This paper, referring to a work in progress, describes functional elements of the user interface of a Virtual World that may provide an important contribution to the process by which primary teachers and pupils collaborate in negotiating spatial configurations of educational spaces (classroom, playground, set for a theatre play, etc.). We have observed this process and some of its inherent difficulties and identified requirements or the functional elements of the interface. Finally, we reflect about factors impacting children´s feelings of lack of authorship and ownership of spatial configurations resulting from collaboration and how a computer system may help in this regard. This Virtual World is therefore configured to be applied in educational contexts where curricular models reflect the new childhood culture where children have an active role in the spaces where they spend most of their time, as schools that adopt the Portuguese Modern School Movement pedagogical model.