Stories For Children

PowerPoint is a powerful tool in the hands of creative students. “Death by PowerPoint” is, in our view, simply a failure of the imagination. (See Boring Old Shakespeare on the Cross-curricular page….)

The original Stories for Children project was developed with the active support of teachers in Taiwan, whose pupils shared files with Year 7 pupils in London, to create bi-lingual stories, exchanged by email. Some stories even ended up as trilingual: in English, Taiwanese, and Mandarin!

Short stories were written in one country, and emailed to the other, with discussion following about:

• how best to illustrate the stories creatively, either from internet files, or (better) by making their own, in Paint;

• cultural differences between the two countries including the choice of topics, and characterisation;

• voice-overs in Mandarin and English;

• Taiwanese students developing their English language skills, while London pupils developed their Mandarin, newly introduced into the Year 7 curriculum, through video-conferencing.

BBC Bitesize in Mandarin proved an invaluable resource for us in the UK!

The project therefore widened pupils’ understanding in England and Taiwan, while developing ICT skills (PowerPoint, Paint, email, and video-conferencing,) and story-writing skills in both languages.

Stories for Children 2

Following this project, there were substantial changes in the UK curriculum, with the focus shifting from using ICT generally, as above, to the addition of computer programming skills.

To help teachers to meet these new demands, we set about creating short stories each of which illustrated a separate computer coding concept:

• Algorithmic thinking (following a set of rules; sequencing skills);

• Debugging (detecting and correcting errors);

• Decomposition (breaking a complex problem down into simpler parts);

• Logical thinking (reasoning skills);

• Generalisation (recognising patterns, and using them to find solutions);

• Abstraction (sorting relevant information from unnecessary detail).