Interactive storytelling in pre-school

This paper presents a successful case-study of introduction of an authoring tool for multimedia storytelling in a class of 27 preschool children. Unlike more sophisticated and demanding approaches, the tool requires basic technology and is very easy to use: in spite of this simplicity, the results are highly rewarding in terms of creativity, media literacy and "traditional" educational benefits (above all the ability to narrate). We deem this extreme simplicity a pre-requisite for large-scale deployment of computational systems for kids in standard, low-tech environments.