On Friday, August 28th, 2020, I had the opportunity to collaborate with Dr. Jennifer Jenson, Professor in the department of Language and Literacy Education at UBC-Vancouver on a workshop for teachers taking part in a week of learning with Science World: STEAM days 2020 (#STEAMdays20). In our session, Jennifer introduced participants to the concept of computational participation and how teachers might engage in (or engage their students in) digital storytelling through Twine to support the development of literacies including computational thinking skills.
Computational Participation is an area Dr. Jenson has researched for some time and, as an elementary teacher, I’ve long had an interest in helping my students develop in all areas of literacy. She and I are excited to be working on a program together called: (CP)² Computational Participation & Competencies Program. The original program was a blended (both f2f and online) program that was set to launch this fall. Given the impacts of COVID and an increased interest among teachers to learn more about approaches to teaching online, we’ve decided to offer this program fully online so that we can both model varied approaches to online learning while allowing participants to connect with research and industry partners to develop curriculum that will foster design and algorithmic thinking and collaborative problem solving. This will also make the program more accessible to teachers beyond the lower mainland. To that end, we are in the process of revising aspects of the course and will be offering it as a fully online program. The program will still allow opportunities to create, play and share in a collaborative environment (and we have some wonderful surprises in store!). You can find the original program outline on the UBC Professional Development Community Engagement website and we invite you to be in touch for further information, to express interest, or to share ideas.
Yasmin Kafai and Quinn Burke’s distinction between computational thinking (all the stuff you know —abstraction, algorithmic thinking, patterns, decomposition) and computational participation (coding, collaborating, creating, playing)… mostly through designing digital games!
Jane, a graduate student working with Dr. Jenson, walked us through getting started with Twine and dove a little deeper into some of the more complex aspects of using this platform. Following this, participants tried their hand at building their own Twine stories.
During the workshop, Dr. Jenson and I had a small group meeting with some K/1 teachers interested in chatting more about the application of this technology to their particular contexts. As a group, we acknowledged that building with Twine is quite likely beyond the ability of most K/1 students and is a task meant for ‘text literate’ students, we brainstormed some potential uses/applications of Twine appropriate across grade levels. Here is a sampling of what we collectively came up with. Most involved a teacher, adult or big buddy as a ‘creator’ or author facilitator.
- create a visual twine (embedding images) that students can independently interact with and navigate, thus building their computational thinking skills and their understanding of story structure.
- utilize Twine to create interactive social (or other) stories that allow students to make decisions and practice real world scenarios as is often done using boardmaker and other applications in special ed.
- whole group story building as Primary teachers sometimes/often do with their students. Allow students to suggest setting, character, plot and even complex paths and problems.
- set up a story structure and involve students in ‘filling in’ the structure, adding to the story, completing the story or setting up an alternate path. With older students, the twine html file can be shared, students can upload the file to Twine online and work on the story themselves. With younger students, this work could be done whole group or in big buddy pairs if possible.
Here are a couple of example Twines created by a participants and shared on Twitter:
Working on Twine this morning at #STEAMdays20. Adding gifs and images, and using different styles and colours of fonts to enhance the text. #SWtechup pic.twitter.com/LpEjL6RV3l
— Carrie Antoniazzi (she/her/elle) (@CarrieAntoniazz) August 28, 2020
How do you make learning fun? Try something new, persist and get a little silly with it! Dipped my toes into twine story telling with @ScienceWorldTR #STEAMDays20 and @yvonnedtechtalk! @twinethreads thanks for merging "choose your own adventure" stories with #21stcenturyskills pic.twitter.com/Jx9XZSsZah
— Blaise Li (@blaiseli) August 28, 2020
Here are a few resources from our session:
- CP2slides_Aug.28
- Twine Handout_Aug2020(prepared by Yousra Alfarra, Scarfe Sandbox project assistant)
- TWINE WORKSHOP RESOURCES_Aug 28
- Getting Started with Twine, Scarfe Sandbox Blog post and video tutorial in English.
- Scarfe Sandbox Blog post and video tutorial en francais