Full-contact poetry - Creating space for poetic collaboration

Full-Contact Poetry is a collaborative digital play space written in Squeak, which allows children to express their poetic thoughts, create their interpretations of writing by others and share and critique these expressions. In this paper, we discuss the design principles and implementation of the Full-Contact Poetry environment. We then describe preliminary results from a workshop with a group of adolescents using the environment. The technology opened a new form of expression to the teenagers participating in the workshop. Collaboration was necessary to define full-contact poetry, but did not occur in the way expected with the technology. Participants drew from personal experience and examples to Create a new genre of poetic expression.