NAME

       storymaps — free story planning and writing application for children

SYNOPSIS

       storymaps

DESCRIPTION

       This manual page documents briefly the storymaps command.

       This manual page was written for the Debian distribution because the original program does
       not have a manual page.

       storymaps is a free story planning and writing application for children that works in many
       different operating systems. It was written by Sean Hammond as part of his PhD. The author
       and worked with teachers, children, creative writing experts and an illustrator to  design
       and evaluate it.

       StoryMaps  breaks  down the elements of traditional fairy tales into building blocks which
       children can use to invent new stories. With StoryMaps children can  create  stories  that
       contain  their  own  original ideas while being structurally complete and well-formed. The
       goal of the program is that StoryMaps will give  children  a  powerful  mental  model  for
       understanding  stories  and  their  construction.  School  trials  of StoryMaps found that
       through using the application children were able to grasp abstract narrative concepts  and
       apply  them to their own writing, and that the experience improved the narrative structure
       of children's stories.

USAGE

       When the program starts, the Planning View is shown.  In this view, the user os  presented
       with  a  collection  of  story  cards to choose from in the green area at the top. You can
       inspect each card more closely by moving the mouse cursor over a card to see  it  in  more
       detail.  You  drag-and-drop  the  story cards that you want to use and arrange them into a
       story map in the grey area below. You can enter a title for your story in the  toolbar  at
       the bottom of the window.

       The  story  cards  are  based on plot functions from Vladimir Propp's study of traditional
       Russian fairy tales, Morphology of the Folktale. They were  illustrated  by  designer  and
       illustrator Raymond Yuen.

       Move  the  mouse  pointer  over  a story card to see it in more detail, and open the story
       editor to see even more detail about the story cards.

       Clicking on the Write your Story! button brings up the story editor. With your  story  map
       in view above, you use the text editor below to enter the text for your story. You have to
       fill in a part of your story for each story card in your story map.  If  you  change  your
       mind about one of the cards in your story map, you can go back to the planning view at any
       time by clicking the Go back to planning    button.

       You can save your story map to file and open a saved story map to continue working  on  it
       later.   When you've finished writing you can preview your story and export it to HTML, or
       print it.

       StoryMaps automatically saves your story as you work  on  it.  You'll  find  automatically
       saved  stories  in  the  StoryMaps  folder in your home directory (on Linux) or in your My
       Documents folder (on Windows). You can open automatically saved stories using the  Open  a
       Saved Story button in the File menu in the StoryMaps window.

SEE ALSO

       This   program   is   documented   fully   in   the  Storymaps  web  page  ,  avilable  at
       http://seanh.sdfeu.org/storymaps/.

       You can read more about StoryMaps, the ideas behind  it  and  how  it  was  developed  and
       evaluated with teachers and children in these publications:

          •  Children's  Story  Authoring  with Propp's Morphology, Sean Hammond, PhD thesis, The
             University of Edinburgh 2010

          •  Children's Story Authoring with  Propp's  Morphology:  An  Exploratory  Study,  Sean
             Hammond,  Tim J. Smith and Helen Pain, 5th International Conference on Narrative and
             Interactive Learning Environments, Edinburgh, 6th-8th August 2008

          •  Player Agency in Interactive Narrative: Audience,  Actor  &  Author,  Sean  Hammond,
             Helen  Pain  and  Tim  J.  Smith,  Artificial  and Ambient Intelligence, AISB Annual
             Convention, 2-4 April 2007, Culture Lab Newcastle University

AUTHOR

       Storymaps is Copyright: (c) 2007-2012 Sean Hammond seanhammond@seanh.cc.

       The images for the story cards have been done by Ray Yuen hello@rayuen.com. You  can  find
       more information about him in his website at http://rayuen.com

       This  manual  page  was written by Javier Fernandez-Sanguino jfs@debian.org for the Debian
       system (but may be used by others).

       For full licensing and copyright details please see /usr/share/doc/storymaps/copyright.

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