NAME¶
storymaps — free story planning and writing application for children
SYNOPSIS¶
storymaps
DESCRIPTION¶
This manual page documents briefly the
storymaps command.
This manual page was written for the
Debian distribution because the
original program does not have a manual page.
storymaps is a free story planning and writing application for children
that works in many different operating systems. It was written by Sean Hammond
as part of his PhD. The author and worked with teachers, children, creative
writing experts and an illustrator to design and evaluate it.
StoryMaps breaks down the elements of traditional fairy tales into building
blocks which children can use to invent new stories. With StoryMaps children
can create stories that contain their own original ideas while being
structurally complete and well-formed. The goal of the program is that
StoryMaps will give children a powerful mental model for understanding stories
and their construction. School trials of StoryMaps found that through using
the application children were able to grasp abstract narrative concepts and
apply them to their own writing, and that the experience improved the
narrative structure of children's stories.
USAGE¶
When the program starts, the
Planning View is shown. In this view, the
user os presented with a collection of story cards to choose from in the green
area at the top. You can inspect each card more closely by moving the mouse
cursor over a card to see it in more detail. You drag-and-drop the story cards
that you want to use and arrange them into a story map in the grey area below.
You can enter a title for your story in the toolbar at the bottom of the
window.
The story cards are based on plot functions from Vladimir Propp's study of
traditional Russian fairy tales, Morphology of the Folktale. They were
illustrated by designer and illustrator Raymond Yuen.
Move the mouse pointer over a story card to see it in more detail, and open the
story editor to see even more detail about the story cards.
Clicking on the
Write your Story! button brings up the story editor. With
your story map in view above, you use the text editor below to enter the text
for your story. You have to fill in a part of your story for each story card
in your story map. If you change your mind about one of the cards in your
story map, you can go back to the planning view at any time by clicking the
Go back to planning button.
You can save your story map to file and open a saved story map to continue
working on it later. When you've finished writing you can preview your story
and export it to HTML, or print it.
StoryMaps automatically saves your story as you work on it. You'll find
automatically saved stories in the StoryMaps folder in your home directory (on
Linux) or in your My Documents folder (on Windows). You can open automatically
saved stories using the Open a Saved Story button in the File menu in the
StoryMaps window.
SEE ALSO¶
This program is documented fully in the
Storymaps web page ,
avilable at
http://seanh.sdfeu.org/storymaps/.
You can read more about StoryMaps, the ideas behind it and how it was developed
and evaluated with teachers and children in these publications:
- •
- Children's Story Authoring with Propp's Morphology, Sean Hammond, PhD
thesis, The University of Edinburgh 2010
- •
- Children's Story Authoring with Propp's Morphology: An Exploratory Study,
Sean Hammond, Tim J. Smith and Helen Pain, 5th International Conference on
Narrative and Interactive Learning Environments, Edinburgh, 6th-8th August
2008
- •
- Player Agency in Interactive Narrative: Audience, Actor & Author, Sean
Hammond, Helen Pain and Tim J. Smith, Artificial and Ambient Intelligence,
AISB Annual Convention, 2-4 April 2007, Culture Lab Newcastle
University
AUTHOR¶
Storymaps is Copyright: (c) 2007-2012 Sean Hammond seanhammond@seanh.cc.
The images for the story cards have been done by Ray Yuen hello@rayuen.com. You
can find more information about him in his website at
http://rayuen.com
This manual page was written by Javier Fernandez-Sanguino jfs@debian.org for the
Debian system (but may be used by others).
For full licensing and copyright details please see
/usr/share/doc/storymaps/copyright.