Seeds for introducing Creative Writing co-laboratory into learning sets: Case studies at Portugal

Abstract

On 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.