by Lauren Hockenson on Mashable
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Name: Reboot Stories
Big Idea: With a trilogy of experiential learning projects, Reboot Stories aims to engage children from low-income school districts with imaginative and educational activities.
Why It’s Working: Reboot Stories is pushing the boundaries of traditional learning by incorporating technology and multimedia into classrooms that otherwise would lack the resources to do so.
How do you get a child excited about learning? What about a child growing up in an underprivileged school district where the classrooms can lack the resources for even basic, traditional programs? For Lance Weiler and Janine Saunders, creating an inspiring and engaging educational program that integrated digital learning became a major passion.
“We wanted to look at a way to drive opportunities within education by letting students be a part of their own education, where they get to put their hands on it,” says Weiler, who serves as creator and story architect for each project.
With Saunders serving as creative producer, they created Reboot Stories to bring their educational projects to life. Their first project, Robot Heart Stories, launched in October 2011 on a very minimal budget. Robot Heart Stories brought together two fifth grade classrooms — one in Montreal and the other in Los Angeles — to help power the journey of a small robot who crash-landed onto Earth.
“Each day matched a curriculum that was built for both classrooms,” Saunders explains. “The Montreal kids centered around the creative aspect of her journey — basically the communications team. The L.A. kids were her tech and science team.”
The robot (whom the students named Laika, after the dog who first orbited the Earth) traveled for 10 days and interacted with the children through videos, photos and a website that tracked her progress. The children were tasked with teaching Laika about Earth and mapping out her journey from Montreal to L.A., where she would board her spaceship and return home.
“We mapped out the route was and we worked with a really great award-winning photography team, and Laika was on the road,” Saunders says.
The project was a success, and Weiler says there’s potential for the project to be a repeatable model for classrooms all over to engage in their own meaningful experience with Laika. Weiler says that kids in both classrooms not only showed a positive reaction toward Laika and her journey, but also eagerly interacted with the educational activities in the classroom.
“There was something about her living in the real world that really got the kids very, very excited, and that was a really beautiful thing,” Weiler adds.
With the first Robot Heart Stories behind them, Weiler and Saunders are now producing Wish for the Future.Where Robot Heart Stories focused on innovating and imagining outer space, Wish for the Future takes a more grounded and personal turn. Through the project’s API, anyone can make a wish for something they’d like to see happen. Wishes are then granted through a creative act such as writing a story or singing a song. Weiler says that the project, when prototyped, helped kids act in a meaningful leadership role with adults.
“We did a wonderful ‘think and do’ lab with kids in charter schools in New York, where the kids came in and they led adult teams through the ideation of ideas that they had and their wishes for the future,” Weiler says. “And those wishes were amazing.”
As for the future of Reboot Stories, Saunders says that they’re going to gear up for another Robot Heart Stories installment, with Laika journeying around the world. A third, to-be-determined, sea-focused adventure is in the works, too. For this crew, the creativity is always flowing.
“There are these amazing participatory surprises because we let elements of that storytelling become owned by those kids,” Weiler says. “And it keeps repeating itself, like a birthday present.”
Interested in giving your own Wish for the Future? Send your wish through the API below:
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