p. 51-58On this document we will present how we have set up
experiments with children from 6 to 14 using the “Creative
Writing Co-Laboratory”. The set of activities proposed
intended to motivate the children to write in a creative and
collaborative way.
We assume that writing is a difficult process and that providing
suitable tools can overcome this difficulty.
Creative Writing co-laboratory is the main output of Portuguese
partner to European CoLabs Project. This microworld has
been translated to Portuguese, English, Hungarian and Slovak.
Creative Writing was developed on a process of co-design with
children, teachers, trainees, educational researchers, designers
and programmers.
We soon realized when testing it with children the great
potential of self expressing not only by writing, but by drawing,
by using characters, balloons, text speech synthesized,backgrounds, pre-recorded sounds and talks recorded on the
way. Now a character can have associated not only text balloons,
but also music composed by the children, text speech or
recorded voice. We developed also a character editor instead
of using only pre-made characters.
We also realized that Maths are much about reading and
understanding, setting up a visual schema of a problem as a path
to find the solution, explaining how the solution was found, and
justifying why a solution can be considered as a correct one.
Creative Writing can be used as a tool for maths activities,
because it’s easy to have visual data representations of problems
that can be handled to estimate possible solutions.
So we evolved from the initial idea of developing four
microworlds to a stronger model of a collaborative platform,
with different templates for different ages and learning contexts.
This idea of templates seems to be much stronger than
the original one of levels. Using this concept we can extend
the microworld potential to eventually any subject.
More information about “Creative Writing Co-Laboratory”
and CoLabs project can be found at http://matchsz.inf.
elte.hu/Colabs