Fiction Factory

This is from one of the Ad put up here by Google. This is how it works (from its website:)

• First a Fiction Factory member invites friends and family members to be contributing authors in a collaborative short story. This person is the story moderator.


• Once everyone is ready, the moderator starts the story by entering the first line.


• The author responsible for adding the next line will then be randomly selected from among the other participants, and receives an email with instructions on how to add the next line.


• This continues each time someone adds their line until the story is completed.

This would be a fun way to develop writing skill for your budding younger family member. In its current form, it would be quite difficult to specifically nail down the learning objectives you want to achieve in this particular activity.

To add some degree of co-ordination and to fit into some curricula, we can add a discussion forum to fiction factory. The stories must be created along specified subject matter. In the discussion forum, the players are encouraged to discuss the development of the stories, but are not allowed to reveal which sentence(s) they have written. Since the next writer is picked by the software in random, there would be a lot of fun to push one's agenda of the story lines along, provided by the opportunity of actually making it into the story AND by convincing others in the discussion forum to go your way.