A Writing Game to Get Students Engaged

My Frankenstories Experience

Back when ChatGPT first showed up in the wider world and my previous work around how we teach writing started to garner some attention thanks to a semi-viral newsletter post that got some traction in certain circles, a small handful of software developers reached out to me to talk. These developers were looking for someone who knew writing curriculum and instruction to help them with their generative AI-based software tools. Without fail, the people I talked to were smart, sincere, and focused on helping students within the confines of also trying to make a product that could survive in the educational technology market.

As these folks showed me what they were working on, I was impressed with their technical know-how, but in every case (save one, which I’ll get to in a moment), what they were working on was essentially a tool for automating the process of coaching a student to complete an assignment for school. These were the constraints of the market dictating what kind of experience the software could provide. These companies figured - probably correctly - that schools were primarily (even exclusively) interested in products that helped with schooling, which is not necessarily the same thing as learning.

Working on solving that kind of problem is of no interest to me. Coaching students to do better on a school assignment is something I’d already evolved beyond in my teaching when I hit upon my approach of helping students instead develop their writing “practices.” We don’t need to coach students to do better on producing things like five-paragraph essays. We have to help them learn to write.

Writing at her newsletter, The Extra Mile, Audrey Watters reminds us that we have to ask not only whether or not education technology “works,” but also what kind of world does the technology suggest we’re supposed to be living in? The now ubiquitous courseware and parent portals have led to a mindset that suggests constant surveillance is a necessary part of the educational experience, to the point that, as reported by Education Week, over one-third of parents are remotely monitoring their children’s computers during the school day itself.

How do we help students become self-regulating - one of my key requirements of becoming “college ready” - if we’re constantly spying on them?

The one exception among those software companies I was talking to was Frankenstories, which you might recognize as the sponsor of this newsletter. Rather than looking at the market of school and asking, “What can we sell?” they asked, “What do students need?”

I’ve been hesitant to write about Frankenstories because I have no intention of turning this newsletter into an infomercial for a product, even if it is a product I believe in.

But the other night I was talking to Andrew Duvall, the creator of Frankenstories, about some stuff they’re working on (that I’m hoping he’ll come here to talk about at some point), and I remembered what drew me to wanting to work with them on the game - essentially, that it’s an expression of the values I bring to helping students experience and learn writing.

I want to talk more about those values and how and why I think those values underpin the engine of learning, the main focus of this newsletter: engagement.

But first, for those unfamiliar, Frankenstories is a collaborative writing game where a set number of players (say, 4-10) is given a combination of a prompt and a picture. Like this:

Each player writes independently, trying to kick off a story that responds to the prompt and picture. After the drafting round, there is a voting round where players are exposed to the responses of others and they’re asked to choose which they think is best, while also “hearting” any they also think are good.

The response with the most votes becomes the first block of the story, after which we transition to another drafting round, sometimes with a shift in prompt, sometimes simply continuing the original thread. The drafting and voting alternates for a pre-set number of rounds until the story is concluded. A round for everyone to take a stab at the title finishes things off and you get:

There’s an uncountable number of variations based on prompts, skill focus, and different images. You’ll never play the same Frankenstory twice.

(Here’s a short video that shows the process in a clever animated fashion.)

I have played the game. I have seen the results of students playing the game. Frankenstories gets you writing, it’s creative and requires concentration without invoking the kind of paralyzing pressure that sometimes happens with writing in school contexts.

It’s fun!

I’ve had a lot of time to consider why I think the game works, and how that ties into getting students engaged with the experience of writing. This is what I’ve come up with:

1. A Frankenstories game is a writing experience. One of my persistent criticisms of how writing is taught in school - a criticism I would level at myself for much of my earlier career - is that writing is taught as a disembodied transaction, a series of steps meant to earn a grade. There’s no grade to be had. It’s just writing to write, which is a wonderful form of practice.

2. A Frankenstories game requires students to practice judgement without the pressure or problem of a grade. Judgement is involved both in the writing of one’s own entry and the reading of the entries of others. Because of the speed of the game the judgements come from the gut, which is an important part of developing one’s writing practice, and also something that can be examined in hindsight to better understand what values this gut judgement is rooted in.

3. A Frankenstories game has appropriate stakes. I will not lie, it is fun to see your passage chosen as the winner of a round, but failing to have your passage chosen as the winner of a round does not feel like a personal blow or ultimate verdict on your abilities. Part of it is that it feels like a game, rather than school, and part of it is that there’s another turn right around the corner. You can’t wallow or second guess because your focus has to be on the next attempt.

4. Playing a series of Frankenstories games makes it straightforward to track your own progress. The first time you play Frankestories you may struggle to even complete an entry in time. Soon this will not be a problem. If you’re matched up against experience players (as I was in playing with the Frankenstories creators)

5. A Frankenstories game is social. One of my biggest questions of the desire among some to push toward a chatbot tutor-mediated future is to wonder what this does to the social atmosphere of school spaces. Some of those same people who are pro-chatbot are anti-phone because phones are isolating, but on phones, at least people are usually interacting with other people. It is, to use a technical term, a real hoot to play a game of Frankenstories as you struggle with the same problem simultaneously.

I could go on and on, but I’ll try not to lay it on too thick. I was so enamored with the experience of the game myself that I invested some of my own money to take a very small ownership stake in it. It’s the kind of experience I want students to have, so why not put my money where my mouth has been?

My advice for teachers who may be intrigued after seeing this post is to sign-up and try playing a few games with your colleagues and get a feel for the experience yourselves to see if it might be something worth introducing into your classrooms.

Frankenstories isn’t going to replace all of writing instruction - it’s not meant to - but I believe it can help make space for students to get engaged and excited about writing.

Try it for yourself!