K-12 Collaborative Digital Storytelling: How to Craft Masterpieces

This chapter discusses a framework for creative and collaborative digital storytelling that is appropriate for K-12 education, and places particular emphasis on generating high-quality stories that are interesting to audiences. The framework was developed as part of a research project supported by the HOC-LAB at Politecnico di Milano, which has been running a national contest on collaborative digital storytelling for K-12 students that has so far included more than 42,000 participants. Using software developed by the HOC-LAB, these participants have created multimedia interactive stories with topics ranging from curricular subjects such as science to noncurricular subjects such as local cultural heritage. Constraints characterize not only the tool but also the creation process, and these aspects of the framework and project will be described in the chapter.