From Athia’s Blog:

How do we teach children the basic elements of story telling?

For as long as mankind has lived on this earth, humans connect to each other through stories. Storytelling is an activity that we have done since we are children; and a story usually consists of three key elements: characters, setting and a plot. At the start of the project, one of the challenges that Stephanie, Zoe and I faced was to define the learning objectives that we hope our manipulative hopes to address. Namely, is the goal of our design to help children learn the elements of stories, or is it to help children understand how stories unfolded? The objectives might be similar to one another, but can yield different outcomes.

If the goal is to teach the three key elements of a story... then learners must be able to understand how each element adds up to another.

If the goal is to teach what makes a good story... then leaners will need to be able to understand what makes a good plot.

Brainstorming and Initial Ideas

Our initial brainstorm session focuses on developing ideas to help teach elements of a story. This includes:

• A board physically representing Freytag’s pyramid, to help learners understand story structure.

• A tangible learning aid to make character development and relationships between characters tangible - for example, by using yarn to connect different characters, akin to a "who did it" clue board.

• The above idea but with the plot physically incorporated as well. For example, characters could move through a physical stage separated into sections of the plot (beginning, middle, end).

• A series of "slide in" tools where learners can decide their characters, settings, inciting incident and resolution to a story (in this idea, we actually included a list of possible inciting incident that usually happens in a classic story structure.

Left: Some of the references that we looked into during the brainstorm session.

Converging the Idea

Eventually, we decided to create a tangible learning tool to help children develop characters in a story. This is due to two reasons:

1. Specificity - we realized that trying to get children to understand the basic concept of storytelling requires a lot of moving parts; children need to be able to understand how different characters relate to one another in order for a plot to work. But the way characters interact with one another also depends on the personality, motivations and fears of each respective characters.

2. Due to time constraints, we made the conscious decision to focus on one part of storytelling, and create a tangible solution that addresses a laser cut need - instead of trying to tackle multiple things at once.

Right: a rough sketch that I made when on our second brainstorm session.

Final idea: The Emotion Stage

Based on the objective to design a tangible learning tool that helps learners develop their own characters, The Emotion Stage takes inspiration from mix and match books for little kids. The goal is for learners to be able to design their characters, not only from appearance but also emotions. By being able to manipulate the facial expression of the characters, the idea is that a learner can explore how a learner would react to scenarios within a story plot, both physically and emotionally.

Inspiration source (left) here.

Building the Prototype

Coming into the prototyping process, we wanted to use a combination of paper for the 'stage' and 'setting' and laser cut acrylic for anything related to the characters. Using acrylic will also give us the stability and depth that we needed as a base, as we wanted the characters to be able to stand on their own. To allow customization, our base characters and manipulated features are fitted with magnets. The idea is that magnets will allow learners to easily snap and manipulate their chosen features.

The stage was designed to feel more like a story-book setting. For the prototype, we mainly used construction paper and fabric fitted into a shoebox. We wanted learners to be able to choose and customize their background, so we created an incision as a 'slot' for learners to change their chosen settings. We created two sample backgrounds in this iteration, but the goal is that learners would in reality have more option or be able to create their own backgrounds.

We envision that this tool can be used in an environment where a teacher or parent is facilitating the activity. The learner can come up with a plot, either individually or with the facilitator, and design their character’s base appearance and feelings. Then, the facilitator can ask questions like: "how would your character react in scenario X?" or "how would your character feel if this happens?" or "why do you think your character felt that way?" to which learners can then respond by physically changing the characters.

Designing the characters

Laser cutting the characters

Sliding the background

Alternative background option

Iterating the Prototype

In the process of designing our prototype, we learned that we needed to make a few changes into our original design - especially ones that revolves our laser cut acrylic characters. For example, we initially cut the facial expressions out of red acrylic. However, the matching colors plus the positioning of the face cutouts made it difficult to see the expressions, especially at different angles. We tried to fix this by painting some of the face pieces black, but the red was still showing at some angles. For a more permanent fix, we redid some of the face pieces, cutting them out of black acrylic instead.

Completed Prototype!

Left: The final prototype and feedback that we receive for it.

What started as a tool designed to help children develop characters can also work as a tool to help children express and articulate their emotions. With more time and resources, we foresee that the project can be extended in multiple ways:

• More customization options to make the learning aid more open-ended for different learners. For example, we could add different outfits to showcase different archetypes of story characters, beyond just having our current basic outfits.

• Have more than one character. We can have learners develop different characters and explore what the dynamics would be like between them. This will extend the activity from exploring a singular character feeling to exploring the cause and effect or relationship between people and how emotions can come into play.

• More dynamic and complex manipulatives, in order to promote exploration of character development. For the purposes of the prototype, we stuck to simpler emotions like happiness, anger, etc., but more attachments could be made to represent more complex feelings and reactions. For example, how would we visually show feelings such as jealousy, grief or safety?

• Accommodating more elements of storytelling. We decided to limit our scope to characters, but it would be interesting to find a way for the learner to represent the entire story on the stage. For example, the stage can be divided into an 'arc plot' of Act I, Act II and Act III.

• More scaffolding to help people use the learning aid. This could take the form of prompt cards for the story or something similar, to help learners generate ideas from within the learning aid itself.