Samorost, Twitter and Scratch – Part 1

Creative writing stimulated by the  Samorost 2 online game, edited in the Twitterverse, with an introduction to Scratch programming thrown in for good measure, proved a fun and rewarding combination. The activities were carried out with Year Five and Six pupils visiting Silverstone Study Centre for two-hour, out-of-school-hours study support session as a part of the Playing for Success programme.

Samorost & Twitter

The first half-hour of the session was taken up in an exploration of the excellent Samorost 2 game. The beauty of Samorost 2  is that it breathes life into almost any creative writing objective imaginable. A mystical, yet strangely familiar planet-scape with a clear storyline fed our imaginations and discussions. First we observed the screen from afar to pick up the plot and describe the main features. We then left our seats and inspected the action and environment close-up, drilling down our descriptions and ideas to take in the finer detail.

Sharing the writing  as a group, we produced an engaging sentence, recapping as many of the creative linguistic devices we could muster to produce a worthy draft.  We recognised that it would require some tweaking before we could pass it on to the next class to repeat and continue the process. Therefore, I introduced the students to my Twitter network and posted their sentence with a request for feedback or ideas. The idea of others immediately reading and evaluating their writing was particularly motivating for them – it’s that purpose and audience thing again!

The students had earned a working break and they were given 10 minutes to further explore the Samorost environment at their leisure.  This gave me time to check whether any responses were coming in via Twitter and importantly, how I wanted to display them without exposing them to other irrelevant/irreverant tweets. I used my @replies screen on the normal Twitter site and to my genuine delight, the responses started to arrive.

The children and I loved the immediacy and authenticity of the audience provided by Twitter. The  known ‘integrity’ of my network meant, from the teacher perspective,  that my children were unlikely to be exposed to any risk. I was in control of what I showed them. As a group we thanked those who had taken time to respond and then set about using some of the advice to produce a final draft that we all agreed was better than the original.

Job done! We had a sentence to pass on to next group and everyone was ready to Scratch…