Shae’s Tech Research

 KidPad is a program that promotes students to work together while enabling them to create a story with visuals.  It provides basic drawing functionability on a zooming canvas enabled by Jazz.  The program was developed by Juan Pablo Hourcade, Ben Benderson, Gustav Taxen and Allison Druin at the University of Maryland.  There are three major goals to the KidPad;

1) Develop tools that support visual and verbal literacy. 

2) Support collaborative learning experiences for children.  Activities such as creating the color orange requires more than one student.  Therefore two students would have to work together and color with red and yellow at the same time to create the desired result-orange.

3)Provide expressive storytelling tools for young children.  Children can naturally create non-linear stories than linear stories.  The KidPad program gives students the opportunity to utilize what already comes naturally to the while developing linear skills. 

KidPad can be downloaded for non-commercial use free of charge at http://www.cs.umd.edu/hcil/kiddesign/kidpad.shtml