Nurit Kirshenbaum and Scott Robertson. 2016. Set&Motion: Tool for Authoring Interactive Stories with Sensors and Actuators. In Proceedings of the The 15th International Conference on Interaction Design and Children (IDC ’16). ACM, New York, NY, USA, 554-559. DOI: http://dx.doi.org/10.1145/2930674.2935988

Children participating in animatronic puppet show workshops are tasked with hands-on activities that exercise both creative and technical skills culminating in a unique learning experience. In this paper, we describe Set&Motion, an authoring tool that supports the creation of animatronic puppet shows. It supports capturing sound and describing the puppet’s animation for any animatronic show. In addition, users can create more complex story flows and allow viewers to interact with the show using sensors embedded in the puppet or its surroundings. It promotes the use of a state diagram to describe non-linear storylines, and may be useful for Computer Science education.