If you think the name sounds fun, just wait until you give this multi-award-winning literacy game a try. Frankenstories is a creative writing game that challenges students to stitch a story together from an initial idea. From simple beginnings, it’s now coming to life in a growing number of classrooms.

Frankenstories is a fast-paced, multiplayer creative writing game. It’s competitive (against the clock and others) but also improvisational and collaborative, as players work together to create and put together their Frankenstory – all while developing and honing their writing skills.

“Students can play as a whole class, in small groups, or even as individuals,” explained co-founder Andrew Duval.

“At the start of a game, players see the same writing prompt – a combination of text and image – and then write to a time limit. When the time’s up, players read each other’s anonymised responses and vote on the one they like best. The winning response gets locked in as the text for that round of the game. They then repeat the process for multiple rounds, building on winning replies until they have a complete text.”

Surprising and exciting

Like most seemingly simple ideas, bringing Frankenstories to life has been anything but straightforward. It has quite a story of its own.

“About 10 years ago, we won a Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation grant to begin creating a mentor-text modelling resource called Writelike.org, which we developed as a side project in our day jobs for many years.

“Writelike is like an interactive textbook. It has real strengths and is genuinely effective, but in the same way that working out at the gym is effective: if you do the exercises, you’ll get the rewards – but doing the exercises takes a lot of motivation.”

Frankenstories evolved from a long line of initiatives trying to make the act of writing more surprising, exciting and rewarding for students.

“When we began prototyping Frankenstories, two and a half years ago, we thought it was going to feel like that ‘telephone’ style writing game, where you write on a piece of paper, fold it over and pass it on. But once we started playing it with groups of people, we realised the experience was far deeper and that we could take this simple mechanic of timed writing rounds with anonymous voting and create a powerful and engaging teaching tool.”

What’s in a name?

The Frankenstories team is based in Brisbane. Currently, the site has 20,000 users per month, including more than 2,000 teachers. About two-thirds of users are in the US and Canada, and the rest in Australia and New Zealand (with a smattering in Singapore, Taiwan, South Korea, and the UK).

With its nod to Mary Shelley’s famous novel, Frankenstein, the name seems perfect for a game that asks players to create something from a number of different parts. And, like the game, it came about through collaboration, as well as a little bit of luck.

“We had a group chat brainstorming session with some friends, looking for names that suggested a shared story created in stages. We were in the middle of the discussion and a friend suggested ‘Frankenstories’. It was the one that everyone kept coming back to. It captured the patchwork sense of the game, it

was playful, had a nice rhythm, let us coin a noun – to write a Frankenstory – and, perhaps most importantly of all, it let us create our mascot, Franky.”

Channel enthusiasm

While there are a number of reasons for choosing to use Frankenstories, Andrew believes two stand out.

“One is that it’s such a powerful way to get students engaged and enthusiastic about writing. We get the same feedback over and over from teachers: when playing Frankenstories, students ask for more writing time and longer word limits, and even disengaged students will try to write something. In many ‘educational games’, the learning experience is just a game that is occasionally interrupted by a quiz, whereas Frankenstories turns writing itself into a game.

“The second reason is that Frankenstories gives teachers a way to take all that enthusiasm and channel it into the development of advanced writing skills. We have hundreds of scaffolded game prompts that cover a whole curriculum of writing skills – including narrative, persuasive, informational and poetry writing.”

In addition, every aspect of Frankenstories is customisable, so you can create any type of writing experience in any subject, any language, for any year level that you like.

Three-layer impact

As for learning outcomes, Andrew identifies impacts in three layers.

“Firstly, Frankenstories has an affective, emotional outcome. It makes students feel like writing is valuable and makes them want to invest some effort to get better at it. “Secondly, when used with intention by a skilled teacher, Frankenstories helps students develop higher-order writing skills.

“Lastly, it develops creativity and collaboration in a specific, tangible (not hand-wavey) way. For instance, playing develops skills in observation, free association, and mental flexibility – which is critical to creativity – and it does it within the context of applying a specific craft skill. And it rewards selflessness, cooperation, and shared attention, all of which are crucial components of collaboration.”

Targeted tool

So, while on the surface, Frankenstories might look like a fast and funny game, underneath it’s a deeply-considered teaching tool. And, along the way, the team has had to overcome a number of challenges.

“One challenge has been simply the time, effort, and funding required to make something both new and good. Another is the time it takes teachers to ‘get the hang’ of Frankenstories. It’s easy to play a casual game but learning how to use it to get the best learning outcomes for your particular students in your particular class takes a little time and experimentation, and most teachers don’t have time for experiments unless they know they will pay off.

“And finally, there’s a kind of challenge in the edtech sector as a whole, which is that providers are incentivised to create monolithic, whole-of-curriculum solutions that tend to consume school budgets and crowd out smaller, more targeted tools like us”

Hall of fame

One regular source of entertainment is submissions to the Frankenstories Hall of Fame.

“We often have groups of students who play Frankenstories for fun and then nominate their games to the Hall of Fame – except we have a PG13 publishing policy and these lunchtime/ homeroom games are almost never PG13. For example, there was a recent one about a kitten crime boss that was very funny but completely unpublishable on our site.”

Feedback is also welcome by the Frankenstories team.

“We were talking to a Year 4 teacher in Little Rock, Arkansas, who told us her students were predominately underprivileged, semi-rural Hispanic kids who liked adventure stories but never recognised themselves in our random images.

“So, we asked her kids to write a list of scenarios and, from that, we created the Little Rock Request Line image set, which is full of pictures of Hispanic middle schoolers riding giant insects, talking to dragons and fighting marauding robots in downtown Little Rock.”

Game for all ages

The site underwent a major upgrade in August last year and is hoping for a big year in 2024.

“We tailored Frankenstories for a middle years’ audience but we have always believed it’s great for older ages. It’s been gratifying to see classes all the way up to Year 13 playing. What’s been more surprising though are Year 3 and 4 teachers who say their kids love it. We always thought typing speed and cognitive load would be a barrier for those younger groups, but apparently not.

“We have several big ideas related to feedback and publishing, but we want to see what’s really important to teachers first. We’re now in the process of collecting teacher feedback and figuring out what might be next.”

Frankenstories co-founder Andrew Duval was talking to INTERFACE Editor Greg Adams.

Find out more about Frankenstories at frankenstories.org You can play casual games for free. There’s also a free 30-day trial available of Frankenstories Pro.

INTERFACE March 2024