Inanimate Alice

Inanimate Alice is an interactive digital story hosted online and told in 4 'episodes'. It follows the story of Alice as she grows up and moves around the world, I'm not going to tell you much about the story, because you should go and read it!

The story is told through a combination of text, pictures, music and interactive games and when I introduced the first episode to my Year 6 English set they initially weren't sure what to make of it. They didn't take it seriously, and, because it wasn't a 'book' they thought they were just playing a fun game and were surprised when I asked them to think deeply about it in the same way I would if we were reading a book. Who is Alice? What do we know about her? What don't we know? Why does she do this? Why did she say that?

Responses to my question 'What is Inanimate Alice?' Included 'film' and 'cartoon' but other children answered that it couldn't be because you can understand those without being able to read, this has text and without it you can't understand the story. Is it just a website? They decided no it wasn't, because it's a story.

It was when we started to look at the structure and features of a digital text and compared it with a written text that they began to understand properly what it was all about.

"In a book you would have to describe the picture Alice drew or describe what her player does but here you can do it with pictures."

"The music helps to tell the story, you know where they are in the world and it creates atmosphere, makes you feel tense when the story gets scary."

After they had read all 4 episodes the children started plan their own episode 5, we talked about what all the episodes have in common and how important it is that they stick to the same style and features. We decided they would use Powerpoint to create the digital version of their stories because they are familiar and comfortable in using it. In pairs, the children planned what would happen to Alice next, and once they had a story outline began to write the story slide by slide, on paper first so they had the text of their story alongside notes about what else could go in the slides. I was impressed and excited by their enthusiasm and creativity, they are a set of borderline level 3/4 writers who usually struggle to get started. When I asked each group, how are you going to turn this version into a digital version? They knew exactly what they wanted to do and had a good idea how they would achieve it.

And that is as far as we have got. I will write another post when their work is finished and hopefully share it here.

Many of the ideas I used in my lessons came from this Inanimate Alice Wikispace I found through google. But best of all, thanks to the wonderful power of Twitter, after tweeting about using Inanimate Alice in class, Kate Pullinger, one of the creators, started to follow me. I sent her a message and will be sharing my class's work with her when they're finished. There's nothing like a quality audience to get children motivated!