What is a story?
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Karen Brennan
Member
July 17, 2009
In today's Creative Computing workshop, we've been creating stories with Scratch.
What was your experience of creating stories with Scratch? How does Scratch expand (or limit) what it means to tell a story?
I searched Google Scholar for storytelling and mathematics and a few interesting articles were returned. I'm not sure if that's the sort of thing you were looking for...
I loved storytelling with Scratch in our workshop. I especially liked the way the story changed -- partly because of the author switches, but also because Scratch (the technology) drove the creativity which was driving the technology ... an infinite loop ... and therefore storytelling becomes a way to look at art/technology and brings us back to the question Mitch asked earlier this week ... sneaky!
Finally (I like lotteries, too!)
I agree that the variety of the sprites and their expressions, the backgrounds and the whole process encourage a more free flowing, fun process of story unfolding.
I guess using a story board to preplan each step would be another approach, and I am sure a lot of preplanning goes into smany of the projects (in the gallery), but it was fun to interact with the given characters and the pieces that the other group members had added. It provided a more spontaneous way of engaging.
When Stephanie Gayle introduced the topic of "beginnings", I thought of the recent Newberry winning book by Neil Gaiman, The Graveyard Book, and its cast of unusual characters:
There was a hand in the darkness, and it held a knife.
I could see using Scratch to explore the elements of a story-maybe a type of alternative book report.
Family stories and local history projects seem like a natural for this format. Students can bring in their digitgal pictures (if they don't have cameras, maybe send a less expensive camera home taking turns by the week, like the kindergarteners sometimes get to take a special toy home) and create narratives to go along with the pictures. They could do "me projects" with time sequences or a type of "family tree".
I agree that using Scratch to create "a product" that synthesizes and incorporates information gathered during the research process would be a great library activity. To overcome time constraints, it could be a shared project between language arts, computer, (all the disciplines-for that matter), and library.
Telling a "Scratch story" about content information will enable students to really learn deeply, and to share in each other's learning, and to have fun!
On a rain free night in a MIT dorm room a tired Creative Computing participant reflected on her day.........
Students won't even realize they are writing when they are creating in Scratch. Scratch allows for even the most uncreative people to get creative. Using the collaborative story telling Scratch programming activity will be great fun in high school. The high level of engagement will be wonderful; I can only imagine what kind of funny stories that will be written through this creative outlet.
After reading the comments of 10 fellow participants, my head is spinning with ideas about how I might approach Stories and Scratch in my classroom. Like Vickie, I am thinking about adapting some projects that I had previously approached with Photostory. In particular, I am thinking about using archival photos as backgrounds and asking the students to bring the photos to life with Scratch. I think this will develop their visual awareness, and allow them to demonstrate historical knowledge they have gained through research.
I loved the application of Scratch into the storytelling process! I have to admit that I am not the most creative person so searching through the backgrounds and sprites really helped me come up with ideas for my story. I think this would really help students who also struggle when asked to think up an original story . The collaborative story undertaking was my favorite part of the conference so far. I loved seeing how my story developed and this process again would help anyone who has a hard time thinking of a story idea, since the beginning or middle of the story has already been created . I think students would feel the same excitement that we did when viewing what our colleagues had done with our stories and I definitely plan on trying out this project with students during the upcoming school year.
I was especially interested in using scratch to tell stories. At my school we have many projects that we ask the students to create stories based on content knowledge they have learned through their research. We teach them research skills and how to present their information as a research paper. Then they are asked to teach their classmates about their their topic in the form of a story, the story is to both inform and entertain. This involves loads of creativity and they must script it out before sitting down at the computer - this project can easily be adapted to Scratch. We currently use PhotoStory and it works very well. But, now that I know (sort of) how to use scratch, I plan on having them use scratch for their second storytelling project. Their final projects are shared with the entire class and then posted on our moodle site for others to see. By posting the the scratch website, their audience will be so much larger! Scratch is more powerful than PhotoStory!
Are you looking for a fun new way to tell a story through technology? We found out today that Scratch is the creative answer to illustrate, interact, and add dialog and sounds :).
Three famous story beginnings:
Once upon a time….1300’s
It was the best of times It was the worst of times…… Charles Dickens
It was a dark and stormy night… Edward B. Litton
Stephanie Gayle asked us two important questions. What does my character want? What stands in my character's way?
Great idea to help students to tell a story. Scratch can be used to tell a story using parallel stacks. Wonderful information we can use in our classrooms.
I think Scratch can expand what it means to tell a story for many people. The graphics and animations can help people express ideas in another way. People who struggle with writing can be very creative with telling stories using Scratch. It could even help them devolop their strories that they write.
I also enjoyed the story telling with Scratch. Unfortunately, I haven't been able to support our writing curriculum due to the fact that I see students once a week for 50 minutes blocks. It would be time comsuming to take a writing assigment from start to completion in the process that is utilizing in the classroom.
I envision Scratch as an avenue to champion writing in a different format. This is great for modification and differentiation.
As a side benefit, I do not feel that the students will think that it is a long and drawn out process to go from start to completion within the Scratch format, even if it takes them a month.
Telling stories using scratch is a way to get non technical students interested in using technology to tell their story in a different way. It is a medium that is not that difficult to learn, and lends itself to a lot of creativity, allowing students to express themselves besides writing...
So...a story is a group of words that has a beginning (introduction of the topic), a middle( development of the plot) and an end( some sort of conclusion or . (WOW!, that was so simplistic)
Story starters get the reader hooked on continuing on and the middle of the story is the develpoment of the idea and the end just brings closure, in some way to the events.
I was very interested in learning to create stories in scratch. I love the idea of combining a curricular goal with a computational goal or learning experiment. Having said that, I am a bit stuck on how to keep the focus on writing and yet let them explore and have fun creating an animated story that is captivating to the reader. So, does scratch expand or limit the goal of storytelling.....HMMMMM? I think in some ways it is limiting because you spend so much time trying to get the characters to do what you want them to do, the content is lost. BUT, I also can see that stories can be brought to life and developed by being able to animate and be very creative about the story telling. Ideas from the story may come from the programming of the characters themselves.
I need to think about how to use scratch for storytelling. I love the idea but I am unclear about how to proceed.
I really enjoyed the story telling with Scratch. It was fun and funny. So far the work I have done with students has all been games and I have worked with math teachers to create them. I can now see ways to incorporate Scratch into a language arts classroom. I especially enjoyed the way we switched computers to continue the story. I think that would be a great project to do next year. All of my 8th graders have used Scratch. Now I can go into a 9th grade English class and use it to tell a story. I think that would be a great way to show kids the connections between disciplines.