Martin Brynskov

This paper presents an architecture, DYNArch, developed to support children’s construction, sharing and performance of group activities and narratives using mobile phones and pervasive computing technologies (e.g. camera, GPS, RFID, gestures). The motivation behind the design is based on current trends in mobile phone adoption by young children and emerging usage patterns. The technical details of the infrastructure are described and motivated. Driving principles have been to use software and hardware technologies that are (or will soon be) easily available and open to modification. The resulting heterogeneous architecture is implemented using Adobe Flash Lite and Python running on Symbian smartphones, and a LAMP webservice backend. While the implementation is initially client-server-based, extensions for peer-to-peer networking are an important part of the architecture and are being developed in parallel. Two generations of the infrastructure are presented – along with scenarios and informal user evaluations – and compared to related work.