Schools

Storyhaven is an immersive reading and roleplaying game for students aged 7-13 years, in which they become adventurers from the town of Storyhaven, sent back into the past to save the townsfolk's tales and rewrite them.

By creating a richly social reading experience and bringing the story world to life through immersive theatre techniques, Storyhaven aims to encourage more children into reading for pleasure, as well as challenging established readers with an innovative new format for children's fiction that encourages them to co-author the narrative alongside us.

Storyhaven can be run in real or virtual classrooms with groups of 2-6 students as part of their literacy, reading, drama, Technology/ICT, or English lessons.

It also works well as a school library or reading club activity to draw reluctant reader students into using the library space more and encourage a love of stories and books. As Storyhaven blends group reading at school with lone reading tasks at home, it helps to build peer and family support for children's reading development.

Storyhaven's main engagement is driven by a richly illustrated reading game that can be played on a mobile phone, tablet or laptop. It helps children design their own characters, then navigate their way through episodes of a branching narrative (choose-your-own-adventure story) in teams, talking decisions over together in a way that creates a fun, bonding social experience and builds skills of negotiation and compromise, peer-group integration and mental wellbeing.

Episodes designed for group play lead into episodes to be read alone, which differentiates players' experience of the story, promoting dialogue in the next session of team play. This harnesses social peer-group experiences to power real changes to children’s reading habits at home, which can be transformative for children from underprivileged backgrounds.

Storyhaven’s use of digital storytelling and gaming techniques defamiliarizes the book form of reading, which many reluctant readers might immediately identify as being an activity that is not for them, or at which they routinely see themselves as failing. During the piloting of Storyhaven in UK schools, the way it enticed reluctant readers into a richly complex and prolonged reading experience, welcoming them into the club of reading and books, was a real strength and innovation of the project.

Children are invited to create their own player characters from one of the Storyhaven town guilds, which gives them different skills to use during gameplay, allowing every player to feel like they have contributed to the success of the mission. The illustrations have been designed to be an inclusive invitation for diverse children to imagine themselves at the heart of the adventure.

Opportunities for student’s creative writing and drama are woven into the storyline of them being adventurers travelling back into the past to save the town’s stories before they disappear. The stories the students must save and rewrite on their mission are represented in the narrative by crystal rune stones that important members of the town carry around with them to honour their story. Each stone holds a key meaning from their tale, teaching the students that stories can be taken apart and retold in different ways, which fosters narrative experimentation in their own creative writing. This narrative device means the writing tasks make sense and have real purpose for children within the experience.

Further literacy-building activities take the form of a richly visual series of worksheets that can easily be printed off or screen shared by the teacher, posted on a class blog or emailed to parents. As the children progress through the story they compile these activity sheets into an adventure journal to increase their ownership of the experience and to produce a tangible literacy achievement by its end, which they might share with family and friends. This boosts their ownership of the reading experience and helps build their literacy skills of note-taking, creative writing and drawing, as well as promoting responsibility for their own learning processes.

Children's immersion in the experience is supported by physical props like a map of the town that can be printed off and given to each student, boosting their ownership of the literacy activity.

Placed in the centre of their gameplay table, it serves as a focus for their’ shared imagining of the story world, further encouraging discussion and the sharing of experiences from the lone reading episodes.

The episodes of the narrative game lead up to thrilling moments of creativity and cocreation, during which students tell the stories they have saved and rewritten to each other, symbolising sending them back through the time portal. This intimate face-to-face oral storytelling, which can be so transformative of students powers of self-expresssion and confidence in their creative abilities, is supported by video messages from actors playing the town story shaman from the narrative, who receives their stories in the imperilled present of the town. These can be watched on tablets or mobiles by teams playing in the school library space or on a projector screen or interactive white board as a whole class creative writing or drama activity, allowing the magic and danger of the story world to infuse the student’s creative work.

If the school wishes, this video content can be replaced by live immersive theatre performances streamed to the classroom via Zoom, so that our actors can interact with the children as they perform their stories. With dramatic sound and lighting effects, the children love how these sessions bring the story world to life and allow them to get bespoke feedback on their creativity from the funny, warm-hearted character of the story shaman. These performances can be shared simultaneously by different classes in your school. Partnering up to share them with another school locally would allow you to share the cost of the live performance across two school budgets and give your students the extra motivation to strive to produce their best work.