Auo is eight years old. She has an eeePC and a membership to Club Penguin. She also uses StarDolls.com a lot, and can sometimes be found in Tootsville. For her all these are as real as Barbie and the pile of jigsaws in the corner of her room.

Over Christmas she decided that she wanted “her own web site”, which turned out to mean her own virtual clubhouse, where she and her friends can meet, hang out, play games, and live the kind of life they live when they hook up their DS Lite Pokemon or Nintendogs games. She decided that she wanted me to help her make it.

After some discussion I decided to take her request seriously. I am curious to see what happens when an eight year old tries to do some imagineering. We began by trying to decide what it would be called, which required me to explain something about how domain names work: that they are unique, and they cost money, although not a lot.

After trying a few names which were almost guaranteed to be already taken (and which were), she decided that she and her friends would be SnowCastleGirls. This would mean that the “town” they all lived in would be like a medieval castle on the outside but nice and modern on the inside, and it would be in a snowy land with frozen lakes, although it might sometimes be summer if the snow became boring.

I then registered (and paid for) the domain, Auo drew an example SnowCastleGirl and wrote out the name so that I could use it as a logo, and I created a very simple greyscale page. Finally I promised that we will work to a deadline of her birthday, which is at the end of August.

I am going to treat this as a piece of research; an opportunity to look into the mind of an eight year old as she tries to make her initial ideas specific enough to be realised online. Maybe it will work, maybe it won’t. Either way it should prove informative.

Stay tuned.