Latest News
Posted on February 10th 2015
Ministry of Stories Visits Year 7
The Ministry of Stories is a creative writing and mentoring centre for young people in East London. They use storytelling to inspire young people aged 8-18, in the belief that writing unleashes their imaginations and builds confidence, self-respect and communication.
The Ministry of Stories has received a grant from the ‘Digital R&D fund’ to develop an online Story Engine in collaboration with tech company ‘This is Paper’ and research partner, the Institute of Education. A group of year 7 girls recently took part in two workshop sessions to help the Ministry of Stories test out their ideas and to try out writing stories of their own.
The aim of the Story Engine project is to create an exciting, entertaining new way for young people aged 11-12 to explore short story writing and to share their writing online.
In the first session, Year 7 pupils explored and discussed the potential of two ‘narrative routes’ for the Story Engine platform and what features it might include. The second session was based in a computer lab. Each pupil had the chance to try out the Story Engine beta version to generate the start of their own short story based on a character generation task. They also gave feedback on what they liked and disliked about the story engine so far.
During the visits, students were very engaged and really enjoyed sharing their ideas on how the story engine should work. They loved trying out the story engine prototype and ‘going with the flow’ to write their own stories with support from online prompts, writing mentors and their English teacher. One student said she ‘felt empowered by the whole experience’ and many pupils said they would relish the opportunity to write more stories.
Miss Vandersteen
