Rosebud encourages children to do more with their stories. Creating this storybook is empowering, and with it, children can collaborate, share, edit, and revise. All of these aspects are play styles which appeal to girls. The computer can uniquely identify the toy and access information virtually linked to it. The computer's dialogue appears in text on the screen, above an empty text box where the stories are typed by the child.
All narrative input is via the keyboard.
To avoid imbalancimg the interaction or misleading the user, computer-generated speech is not used. Prompts are generated according to current user, toy, and story. Marc, a seven year old boy, writing a story using Rosebud. He is using both the traditional stuffed animal toy and the computer simultaneously, merging the physical and digital worlds. Children understood intuitively that to introduce the toy to the computer, it is held facing the machine.