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Here you'll find detailed documentation of Story Squad's many moving parts. For a more concise overview, please take a look at the project docs.
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What are Story Squad's Fundamental Design Principles?
If you have any questions, please feel free to contact a team member.
Story Squad is an interactive learning platform for 3rd-6th graders. Gameplay centers around a serialized children's novel by author and educator Graig Peterson, and involves reading the weekly prompt and responding with creative content. Once students submit their own work, they're paired up and entered into a bracketed competition to see whose entries come out on top!
With today's overabundance of digital media, it's hard to pull kids' focus back to literacy and the arts. Teachers and parents are already stretched thin, so it's easy to see why video games and streaming services have such a foothold in this particular demographic. Yet this age - late primary through middle school - is a particularly critical time in a child's literary and artistic development. We here at Story Squad think it's time to recapture some of those hours by working with today's technology, rather than against it.
Story Squad captures the attention of both struggling readers and gifted students by taking elements of their favorite online games and marrying them with literacy and art. Each week, students are presented with the next chapter in an exciting, serialized novel written by Graig Peterson. After reading this week's story, members of the Story Squad are prompted to respond with artistic feedback. The exact type of content students will generate varies from week to week, but includes fan fiction, illustrations, and even comic panels.
This content creation is where Story Squad pulls away from the rest of the pack. Students are encouraged to go offline in order to create their work. This gets kids away from the screen and back into the real world, where they can flex their creativity while strengthening their writing and fine motor skills. Once they finish their entries, they or their parents simply snap a picture of the student's work and submit it through the easy-to-use interface.
Story Squad uses handwriting recognition to translate the child's entries into an easy to read text snippet. Entries are moderated to ensure appropriate content, and then Story Squad's matching algorithm pairs each student up with a teammate based on grade and ability level.
Once kids are matched up, the competition begins!