Posts Tagged ‘creative writing’

  • Transmedia to Encourage Creative Thinking in Adolescents

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    I spent two years teaching English Language Arts to seventh and eighth grade students before coming to Michigan State to study Serious Game Design. One of the things that struck me is that my boys and girls were consuming a lot of media in their free time, especially video games.

    But as I have been here, sitting and soaking in theories and practices for serious game design, I’ve seen a bigger push than ever toward transmedia. As an educator, the possibilities of this multimedia concept, intrigues me. Teens in particular, are engaged not just in games, but music, comic books or manga, and movies. What would a project that combines these formats look like? How would teens access it? What would they want or expect?

    In addition, the old English major in me is very interested in how one could create such a transmedia project with the purpose of inciting creative writing within this age group. Text prompts were never enough in my room to get them going. I was always needing to “gamify” creative activities to motivate a good 2/3s of my classroom.

    So for this session, I would like to explore transmedia opportunities for developing creative citizens (or wordsmiths) of tomorrow. I think it could be interesting to explore small scale transmedia projects in existence as well (rather than the big budget worlds out of reach for aspiring game changers). I rather took a meandering walk to the point. This session would be part helpathon, part general discussion, and part solvathon, I think.