“Life is a fight, but not everyone’s a fighter. Otherwise, bullies would be an endangered species.” -Andrew Vachss

 

 

 

PREMISE

A interactive storytelling experience needs to be designed for schools to make the children aware of cyberbullying and how to deal with it.

 

 

 

SYNOPSIS

Cyberbullying means using online technology to harm someone intentionally and the world is becoming digital and kids are more at risk now. Kids with learning and thinking differences are more likely to be cyberbullied than their fellow students. There are various things to do to assist prevent the child from being cyberbullied and spread awareness about it with the help of interactive storytelling which brings stories alive and creates a participatory and immersive experience that allows Young Learners to enjoy seeing and hearing the stories in a dynamic, stylistic and entertaining way.

INTRODUCTION

Before the internet, bullying was a problem but it was a problem that didn’t extend into the pockets, bedrooms, living rooms, and beyond of students’ lives. Cyberbullying is a form of bullying that takes place over digital mediums. Students may be cyberbullied on their phones, computers, and other devices by receiving harassing chats, texts, messages, comments, forum posts, and pictures that cause them emotional harm.

Cyberbullying affects the children’s mental health and causes problems in their functioning and has a lifelong impact, victims of cyberbullying will feel depressed, and may even tend to commit suicide. Preventing it can be a challenge but one can take effective steps to keep students safe. Preventing the problem involves understanding just what cyberbullying is. Therefore, I created this work where I could spread awareness about cyberbullying and share the solutions of how children can prevent it and what steps are needed to be taken. I have selected interactive storytelling because children have an innate love of stories and their mind tends to engage more with visuals and animations. Stories create magic and a sense of wonder in the world. Storytelling is a unique way for students to develop a clear, easy, and better understanding of a situation and the problem. Plato famously quipped that “those who tell stories rule society.” This statement is as true today as it was in ancient Greece – perhaps even more so in modern times.  This Concept Diary contains an explanation of the context, a description of the creative process, and a final conclusion. 

(Source: Dribbble)

 

 

CONTEXT

Sadly, bullying behavior has been around since the origin of civilization. Bullying has consistently taken form as stronger people preying upon the weak, and now, with the increase of technology, it has also become widespread online. Cyberbullying has become a growing problem everywhere in the world. Essentially, cyberbullying doesn’t differ much from the sort of bullying that a lot of children have unfortunately grown familiar with at school. the sole difference is that it takes place online. Young people are the foremost active internet users, therefore the incontrovertible fact that they’re more frequently a victim of cybercrime doesn’t come as a surprise. Kids can be mean sometimes. Unfortunately, the web often makes it easier for people to mention hurtful things because it’s more impersonal and anonymous than the real world. As a result, many kids participate in cyberbullying albeit they do not consider themselves bullies. It’s important for children to know that the comments they create online can hurt even as very much like those made face to face (Eluna Network, 2018).

 

• To educate them on what is cyberbullying and how it starts
• Show both sides of cyberbullying
• What to do if you or someone else is being cyberbullied

 

WHY INTERACTIVE STORYTELLING?

Literature shows that storytelling, in general, is a powerful pedagogical approach that can be used to enhance learning outcomes for education (Sharda, 2007, p. 181). Due to technological advances, we are now able to tell stories through new digital media tools. The digital and interactive storytelling has gained attention in the HCI and AI communities, exploring the potential of interactivity and multimedia as a means to promote engagement, enjoyment, fun, to foster new forms of children’s creativity, and to increase the educational benefits of traditional storytelling for this target group (Garzotto, Paolini, & Sabiescu, 2010, p. 1). Research on the effectiveness of digital storytelling in the classrooms suggests that digital storytelling is indeed a powerful tool to integrate with learning activities to create more engaging and exciting learning environments (Smeda, Dakich, & Sharda, 2014, p. 19).

CREATIVE PROCESS

I spent the first four weeks on research to deeply under the concept of cyberbullying, without understanding the problem there can’t be a solution. My research was focused on literature study(books, articles, blogs, and documentaries). For the Design Thinking method – empathise, define, ideate, prototype, and test – is used. The first step was to try and get my hands on illustrator and after-effects to create something and visualise my idea but all the images used in the prototype belong to Adobestock.

I worked with Twine to create my prototype, which is a tool for creating interactive fiction, where users read content and then interact by clicking links in the text. It uses a visual flowchart, and scripting largely involves creating hyperlinks between these nodes, or “passages”. It outputs an .html file with all of the information in it, making it immediately playable online as well as highly-customizable – anything somebody can do to a web page, one can do with Twine. The main interaction in Twine games is clicking a hyperlink.

There are several programming features built into it such as variables and if-statements. Different Javascript macros are used that greatly expand the functionality of the tool. There are also themes that are used to change the appearance of the game (colors, backgrounds, effects), much like the appearance can be changed of any given webpage. One can write his/her own CSS (like I did) to modify its appearance yourself.

 

First iteration- Twine

 

 

 

 

 

 

After doing more research, the following points were taken into account:

Designing for Children

Key takeaways in design for children are: 

• Kids love colors, they expect their apps to be bright and engaging (Paige, 2019).
• Design interactive elements with a clear characteristic that indicates they are tappable (Paige, 2019).
• Split up multiple-step processes up into multiple screens, or disable the second step until step one was selected (White, 2016).
• Use simple icons, instead of (complex) words (White, 2016).
• Include game fiction, for example characters (Sailer & Homner, 2019, p. 77).

 

Second iteration

I have used passage transition to maintain the flow of the story by using the code shown in the image above.

 

 

 

I have put few humorous questions to make the story more engaging and tried not to make it serious like my first iteration as the focused group is children and this could be a nice way to engage them and tell them about a very important topic.

 

 

I have set the theme of the story as a tale so that the user gets more interested to see it. Background music and sound effects are used to give stories a more real feel.

 

 

 

 

 

Stories of 3  characters who have experienced cyberbullying and tells how to prevent it from their experiences.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

After every passage, there is an option to turn the page which takes the user to the next part of the story in the existing page for which the passage transition was done.

 

 

 

 

At the end of every story, the ways to prevent cyberbullying are given within the story and then options to go to the other stories and also direct option to the learnings of all the stories if the user wants to.

 

 

 

 

After completing all the stories, learnings from each story are presented. Every story tells a different experience and covers different parts of the cyberbullying children could face.

 

 

After iterating different versions of my prototype the following concept was created. The prototype consists of three levels.

• Introduction – Few humorous questions to engage the user.

• Three cyberbullying awareness stories – Julia, Stuart, & Sean.

• Learnings.

Therefore the Attention, Relevance, Confidence, and Satisfaction (ARCS) motivation based theory for designing digital instructional activities and games for students is used (Keller, 1987):

 

Usability Testing

To test the concept, five 12-16 year-old children were recruited. To gain qualitative insights into the students’ feelings towards the concept working Twine prototype was used during the test. The main goal of the test was to find out if the prototype can maintain the attention of the children and if they gain some knowledge about the topic.

The setup for the test was the same for all five children from New Delhi. First, they got a short introduction mainly to comfort them and asked them to think out loud while using the prototype. Then they started using the prototype which starts with an introduction then some questions to keep it engaging then 3 different stories and learnings in the end. After using the whole prototype, a general interview was conducted. The results were used to conclude on four key takeaways on which improved the concept was improved:

 

• The children would like more stickers, pictures, and sound.
• The children want everything to be clickable, even the pictures.
• As long as it is clear to the children that the way to the next story is stated in the text they don’t mind reading a lot of text, they sometimes even prefer more text.
• Children would like to get more information about such topics if it is presented in the right way.

 

A very positive result was the fact that all five of the children were able to maintain their attention. According to a participant’s own words: “I was sure to get information about the topic and all the elements kept me engaged while reading the stories.”

The final prototype

The main goal of this prototype is to make children aware of cyberbullying. Therefore the final concept consists of three parts- Introduction, stories, and learnings.

The application is the center of the concept. After testing, the initial concept was upgraded with several features: more pictures, theme and flow of the stories and the sounds. All three stories consist of the same structure, first the experience about the topic then the prevention.

The prototype can be viewed here: https://kartikey-watts.itch.io/cyberbullying-awareness

 

 

CONCLUSION

As a result, all the pages demonstrates how the new digital technologies can be used to construct rich entertainment experiences. In the process, they provided me with excellent working models to study. As I had tested my story with the focused group I selected it gave me valuable feedback and I made some more changes accordingly and now the prototype presents cyberbullying awareness in a really attractive and understandable way. Further, I would like to combine chatbot with interactive storytelling to let the user ask his/her questions and get more information about the topic and also experiment with augmented and virtual reality to make my story more interesting. For further research, I would like to research on cybervictimization and digital citizenship through the same process followed in the current research.