Frankenstories

Frankenstories is a collaborative writing game designed for the whole class to "stitch a story together."  In a game, everyone receives the same writing prompt. Players then dive into a timed writing round to craft their response, often adhering to a character limit like 280 characters.  After each round, players vote on the responses. The winning responses are then "stitched in place," and the game continues for a set number of rounds (usually five) until a complete story is formed.

The game follows a core loop of "Write, Read, Analyse, Adapt" to promote cognitive load, social learning, and creativity. Frankenstories is generalisable, meaning it can be used for any grade, any subject, any text type, and any writing skill. Teachers get customisation and control, and there are hundreds of pre-made writing prompts available to explore.

Frankestories Meets Gemini - Minecraft Character Description

I recently explored using Gemini's image generation capabilities within Frankenstories, a collaborative writing platform. I started by generating a simple silhouette of a Minecraft character, which served as the visual prompt to spark students' imaginations. I kept in mind the elements needed for Gemini to generate an accurate image later. I then wrote five writing starters (prompts) in Frankenstories; for example, Round 1 - Physical Description: What does the face of the Minecraft character look like? Eye color? Hair color? Mouth?

Students worked individually or in groups of two to write and some utilised the voice-to-text functionality. We focused on using strong nouns, precise language. The questions guided students to describe the character's appearance, personality, and surroundings with detail. 

After each voting round, we finally had our finished story. I modeled how to use Gemini's image tool with students. The finalised character description, acting as our prompt, was then fed into Gemini's image generation tool. We tweaked the prompt to explore different possibilities, such as changing the character's background biome from a snowy forest to a plains biome.

This activity also provided an opportunity for discussion. For example, omitting the key phrase "create a pixelated Minecraft character" resulted in a more stylised, illustration-like character rather than the specific, block-based aesthetic we were aiming for.

Overall, this task was a successful introduction on how Frankenstories and Gemini can work together to enhance creativity, collaboration, and critical thinking.

Image created