In ECE 211, students will apply computational thinking concepts by designing and creating a digital storybook for young children using the Storybird platform.
Title of Activity/Assignment: Storybird (Digital Storytelling)
Description: Storybird is a digital storytelling platform, using artwork from illustrators and animators to inspire imagination and creativity in writing. Students will work collaboratively with a partner to develop an online children’s picture book, appropriate for grades Prek -2. Students will be guided to create an “untold” story that builds upon their lived experiences.
Rationale: ECE 211 is a course that integrates the creative arts and emergent literacy, which makes Storybird the perfect digital storytelling platform for this assignment. Storybird is a visual storytelling medium that will engage our students in exploring diverse artworks from a global collection, using a technological tool that they can bring into an early childhood classroom, often introducing digital storytelling to young children for the first time. As a collaborative digital storytelling platform, Storybird provides opportunities for children to tell stories together with their families, engaging their own cultural and linguistic practices and connecting with family members who may live in distant places.
Standards: Impacts of Computing (IC) 1,3,6; Computational Thinking (CT) 1,4, 6,10; Digital Literacy (DL) 2,4
Learning Goals: This project centers creativity in a unique way. Students engage with the work of illustrators from around the world, select illustrations that speak to them, and find the story within those illustrations. It reverses the usual process that centers text first, and builds visual literacy, supporting students in being critical interpreters of images. Students can choose the language(s) they want to write in and tell stories from their lived experiences affirming, building on, and extending learners’ linguistic and cultural practices. The project is learner-centered and collaborative, encouraging students to not only tell their stories, but share stories with one another and look for points of connectivity.
CT Skills:
- Using the concepts of Computing as Literacy (CAL) Students will prototype, remix, edit, revise, and iterate as they design and write a children’s book from a set of illustrations they will choose (Abstraction, Decomposition, Debugging).
- Students will sequence illustrations to form a story as they reflect their own perspectives (Algorithmic Thinking).
- Students will critically analyze images to find the story within those images, in relation to their cultural identity and lived experiences (Abstraction, Pattern Recognition, Decomposition).
- The story will be revised, edited and published in a digital book that will then be shared with the class (Selecting Tools, Debugging).
This is a link to the Storybird platform. First, create a class. Then you can add your students to the class. To begin their project, students will sign in to the class using the link in the guidelines. Here are the Storybird Guidelines for students.
After the students complete their Storybird, they complete a self-reflection that asks them to think about the computational thinking skills they used in this assignment (metacognition).
Here are a few examples of the work of prior ECE 211 students:
Gaia-and-Ana Maya-and-Kari Christal-and-Maggie what-is-a-circus- rocky-s-journey