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VIEWDATA and story writing - creative computing

Every primary teacher must have had the experience - you give an exciting stimulus to the class and ask them to write a story of their own from your starting point. Heads down as they start writing: invented spelling, of course, so as not to interrupt the flow! The big disappointment comes when you read the stories later and see how the great ideas you discussed with the group during the lead-in to the lesson have become diluted and simplified because the mechanics of the writing task were just too immediately important to the children, and the excitement sub- merged into the backs of their minds.

How often have we seen stories written, even by fluent writers, where the mechanical tasks of describing and explaining take precedence over the develop- ment of an interesting story line or a convoluted plot? Unless children are allowed plenty of time, it is very hard for them to develop their imaginative writing to its full potential. Few teachers have sufficient patience to wait a week, or several weeks for the whole story to emerge. My 9-year-old son recently spent about 5 weeks between beginning a detective story at home and finishing it; it took up nine closely written pages of A4, with detailed pictures illustrating essential clues, and several strands of the plot were developed and the mystery eventually solved. I’d love to have the time in school to encourage children to write stories in which plot is important and is developed in some logical way.

When I first met the LOGICAL VIEWDATA program, it was presented as a means of recording information about a topic in a logical way with numbered pages appearing on screen and a complex routing system. I tried tomake up a VIEW DATA file about my own school’s Centenary project, but gave up after one unsuccessful attempt. I found the routing system and the instructions in the ILECC booklet very complex. More recently, the program was explained to me in a more user-friendly manner during a course, and its potential for story writing was mentioned. At last, I thought, here’s a way of getting children to think about the plot of a story and the connections between the various episodes. Back in school, I started using the idea, but not the program, with a group of about 15 first and second year Juniors, all of whom have great difficulty with both reading and writing on their own. We sat in a group, with a large piece of paper and a fat felt pen, and started working out ideas for a story.

Of course it had to start with ‘Once upon a time . . .’ so that went on the paper first. Lots of suggestions followed: ‘there was a boyla girl/various animals’, and by consensus we chose ‘a deer’. Then the questions were posed: where did it live, was it a male or female deer, was it young or old, did it have a name, what happened to it in the story? Most of the questions were raised by me at first, with many different answers coming from the children, who sometimes developed their own versions of the story (verbally) with two or three episodes. Each time there was a conflict, we would resolve it with a vote, if consensus didn’t work.

The children were now becoming very excited about the story, shouting out ideas and arguing for or against certain decisions, so we calmed down by starting again on a new page and reviewing the plot so far. This time they wrote the story into their own note books. We changed the ‘Once upon a time’ start to ‘One day . . .’ because they said it wasn’t a fairy story, so ‘Once upon a time’ wasn’t right. This time, I arranged the bits of the story into separate blocks, each of which would

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eventually correspond to VIEWDATA pages, so we got:

The Best Story in the Whole World (press 1 to go on)

One day in the country there lived a deer and his mother (go to page 2)

One day the deer‘s mother died and Pierre the baby deer was lost (go to page 3)

At this point the story began to branch, as two ideas came up, either of which would have worked, so we began to develop along the lines of a VIEWDATA program. We finished this story and presented it to the school in a ‘show and tell’ assembly. For some of these children it was the first time they had ever shared in constructing any piece of writing which had a plot, with beginning, middle and end (or three ends in this case). We managed to enter the first two frames into the VIEWDATA editor program during the first session, with one child reading and spelling out the story and another entering it at the keyboard. Later that week, with the same group, we started on a new story. This time I decided to start at the ends, with four possible endings, two happy and two sad, then work backwards to the middle and beginning.

I then started to use the VIEWDATA program with a mixed ability second year class - they had been working on multichoice ideas for story writing, e.g. stories about witches, princesses, animals or children, with a time limit for the production of each page. After looking at the stories produced on VIEWDATA by the language group, they began to prepare their stories in the VIEWDATA page and routes format. This process was made easier by putting pairs of children together - each one had written a story which they read to their partner and discussed the rearrangement into pages and multichoice options. They continued in pairs to enter the work at the computer, with decisions about colours and graphics being made cooperatively.

During the next session with this class, 2 or 3 days later, I introduced a kind of cascade instruction method: two children would work on the program and after a certain time, one would leave to go to some other work and a new child would come to the computer to be taught how to operate the program. Again after a certain time the second child would leave, and a fourth child would come to be taught by the third child. This system worked very well as an introduction to the mechanics of running the editor program; a lot of stories were begun in the session and finished later as the children became able to work on their own.

I had to make an introductory page which would give the titles of the various stories on the disc. We designed a title page and then gave instructions about which number to press for each story on the disc. Each disc is capable of taking about a thousand pages, so the introductory pages could be arranged as a kind of contents

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list showing ‘chapters’ of stories, either on different topics like ‘fairy stories’ or ‘adventures’, or stories written by different groups of children such as the second years, or Ms Smith’s language group. If there was still space on the disc, children could be prompted to make their own stories, using the editor, and assigned unused pages on which to enter them. The stories we were making didn’t usually go above 10 pages, so the assignment of page numbers was quite simple, e.g. ‘you can use numbers 50 to 60’.

The advantages of VIEWDATA for story writing are considerable, including, of course, the motivational aspects of using computers and print-out facility which allows copies to be made for all participants in the composing group. The graphics facility ensures a colourful, interesting-looking page on screen, - there is emphasis on episodes and progression within a particular story, and the multichoice elements of the program encourage cooperative groups to enter their own ideas within the framework. The audience is greatly increased since not only can the story be printed out and displayed but it is always available on disc for readers to use.

All told, I found the program immensely exciting to use in this way, and the children too found it interesting and highly motivating. With the remedial group, it provided a means for the first time, of going beyond the most simple types of story, and allowing them to produce their ideas in a form valued by themselves and other children. Although I don’t wish to describe it here, the program also has potential for maths learning in the functioning of the routing system - I found that many second year Juniors were able to understand and use it in context.

JOHN MEADOWS Copenhagen Primary School

Using the GRASS program*

Children are regularly called upon to collect data and to record it in a variety of ways: tally charts, block graphs, pie charts, Carroll diagrams and Venn diagrams to name but a few. An important part of this work would include reading back any information collected in these ways, being able to note any relationships, discover new properties, draw conclusions, make hypotheses from the data, and solve problems.

Data Retrieval programs are a natural extension of this sort of work, with the added bonus of being able to handle large amounts of data with ease. Programs like GRASS will sort data alphabetically or numerically and allow you to search for par- ticular data and then narrow down that search. Although data retrieval is not so open-ended as LOGO, it is an interactive process which puts the child in command of the computer. The census returns would be ideal data to handle with this sort of program and packages like the SCAN FOX 1871 on disk pack 1 are available.

The chief difficulty with programs like SCAN and even QUEST is that you need to learn the language of the programs before you can easily get at the data you would like to use. Although the syntax and the grammar of these sorts of programs are fairly consistent they do present a barrier through which it is not easy to pass. If you couple with that a class of children, the majority of whom are bilingual and in the early stages of learning English, it becomes an almost insurmountable barrier.

The GRASS program comes as a welcome release from spending inordinate amounts of the time framing the correct questions for any SCAN file. With GRASS

*This article is part of an assignment written for a PriCAL course.