
This paper describes a collaborative experiment with a special software application supporting the
acquisition of initial reading and writing skills embedded in a computer-integrated environment for
young children. The NIMIS project has set up three Computer-integrated Classrooms across Europe
with appropriate “roomware” environments, i.e. furniture, hardware and software to support early
learning. Here, we present a collaborative writing task facilitated by a shared workspace system, that
has been evaluated with first graders using one of the software applications T3 (Today’s Talking
Typewriter). Mixed pairs of children used the shared workspace provided by the application to perform
a typical first graders writing task collaboratively. The speciality of this experiment lies in the study of
domain-specific collaboration in a rich real-world learning environment.