Reading for pleasure is the single most important indicator of a child’s future success, building creativity, critical thinking and empathy, but it is on the decline. Our mission is to encourage more children to read by framing it as a fun, social and interactive experience through new formats that blend reading, storytelling, digital gaming aesthetics and immersive theatre performance.
Storyhaven’s main engagement is driven by an illustrated reading game that can be played on a tablet or mobile in real classrooms or breakout rooms. Children design their own characters, then navigate their way through the story in teams, talking decisions over in a way that builds social skills, peer-group integration and mental wellbeing.
Opportunities for children’s creative writing are built into the storyline, so that these tasks have real purpose for children within the experience. As the children progress through the story they compile these into an adventure journal to increase their ownership of the experience and produce a tangible literacy achievement by its end, which they might share with family and friends.
The storyline incorporates performances from an actor playing the character of the story shaman from the narrative to bring the children’s roleplaying to life and motivate them to produce the creative writing they will deliver to him through his time portal.
Storyhaven won £30,000 of research funding in 2020 and was piloted over three months with Year 4-6 pupils in UK primary schools. It was spotlighted in the British Library’s Emerging Narrative Formats Award and invited to present to an audience of 25,000 at the Bologna Book Fair as a new reading format blending digital and physical spaces for children. It is now running in schools and public libraries in the UK, China, Italy, Finland, Spain, France and the USA.
It has recently secured another £20,000 of funding to run the experience more widely with schools as well as to develop the idea into an experience that families can use to encourage children's love of reading and books at home.
You can read more about the project and the creative team behind it's development here: https://storyhaven.app/school/
If you wish to run Storyhaven in a school setting, please contact the project lead Gareth Osborne: gareth.osborne@bristol.ac.uk
