Introducing A Single-Player Mode For Story Squad

About Story Squad

Story Squad is a gaming application where kids between the ages of 8–12 can sign up for a ‘Fantasy Football’ type of experience when it comes to reading, writing, and drawing. It focuses on those skills to further develop them and unleash creativity. Founder, Graig Peterson, was a 6th-grade teacher before he began his journey with Story Squad. He was able to notice how much potential there was for those 6th graders to unleash their creativity yet be consumed by screen time from either their phones, tablets, or whatever accessible to them.

“…first, children’s works, that is to say their stories, poems and meditations, their drawings, paintings, and models, may be legitimately described as works of art; and second, to acknowledge the artistic status of children’s works revolutionizes the process of education.”

— Professor Michael Armstrong at the Bread Loaf School of English in 2015 in his course, Describing the Imagination

More than ever, the youth now have been immersed in more screen time whether it’s video games, social media, watching video snippets, etc. Story Squad was created to switch kids from a screen-time mode to a more ”Creative Mode” by creating the app to advocate for less screen-time. This is possible by having the child upload handwritten stories and drawings on paper.

The gamification of the application goes like this:

• The child will accept the mission where he/she will be taken to the reading portion for that mission
• After they are done reading, they will have the chance to move on to the drawing part where they will choose their favorite scene of what they read and draw that scene out
• They will then move on to the writing part where they will write a 1–2 page story based on what they read
• The child will be matched with another player to create a squad where they will battle it out with another squad
• They will be able to do point sharing between each other where they can assign points to their drawings and writings however they want and later battle with the other squad’s drawings and writings

Team C’s Feature

There were three groups working on the project during the timeframe that I was assigned to the project. My group and I were Team C and we were signed to work on the Single Player Mode for Story Squad where the player has the option to go through a solo player mode or in other words a ‘Story Mode’. This allows the child to experience the game without fully committing to the cohort mode where he/she would be part of a team. They would instead be able to accomplish the reading, drawing, and writing tasks right away instead of having to do it in the span of one week.

The time we had to work on the project was mostly spent getting to know the application and how it works. Our team was made up of Data Science and Web Developers. I was part of the Web Developers. As we went through the code of the project, we made decisions such as not focusing on the back-end part since much of what we wanted to work on we could easily utilize the back-end created for the cohort mode, for the single-player mode.

We started off the Single-Player mode with the button bar feature that would allow the user to know the status of his/her progress and be able to move across the read, draw, write with ease. Our stopping point was working on the uploading of the drawing and writing.

The Future for Story Squad Single Player Mode

Time with this feature felt short but there is so much potential for the single-player mode since we are also working with a more on-demand culture.

Future developers that will work on this feature will have to work on having the users be able to choose the option to either draw or write, or they can do both tasks.

They will also need to incorporate a slider voting mechanism so the user can have an easy-to-understand voting system. The goal is to preserve the human voting aspect of the game since the child will be in a single-player mode where human interaction takes place more so with the characters of the story.

Being a part of Story Squad is an honor and is something that I stand by and will continue to advocate for. This is the type of gamification we should be seeing especially for the future of our youth.