Digital Storytelling in the Classroom at Avenues: The World School with Lightwell

From storyboarding to publishing their own apps, Avenues students shared their creative expression and learned key technical skills along the way.

Part of our #SpotlightSeries In Lightwell Education 🎒👩‍🏫 💻 🍏

Examples of 6 student scenes pulled from their published iOS apps.

Every winter, Avenues in NYC gives students a full week elective to learn something new like Chinese Calligraphy or Creative Coding. This year, Yumi Nakanishi (@ynakanishi), a Lead Tech Integrator at Avenues, created a winter seminar course for “Digital Storytelling: Create a Storybook App with Lightwell.”

Yumi created this course specifically around Lightwell’s unique features like easy-to-create animations, character lip syncing, visual programming with logic and variables, and export to Xcode for publishing a native iOS app.

She wanted her students to learn critical thinking, collaboration, and creativity, but most of all, to build a real world product. Students experienced the app development process and finished the week with an iOS app that they could share with friends and family.

Yumi understood the importance of empowering her students to be confident communicators through sharing their story with a larger audience via app creation.

A little backstory…

The team behind Lightwell is also the team that created a series of top-selling original interactive storybook apps, The Adventures of Pan. Our apps hit #1 in 42 countries with over a million downloads. During that time, we created an internal tool called Lightwell to help streamline the app development process.

Yumi invited us to present the process of developing The Adventures of Pan to kickoff the Winter Seminar.

Day 1: Story Ideation and Lightwell Introduction

5 things you need to start: an eager student, a Mac computer with Lightwell installed, pencil, paper, and a creative imagination!

Students were given a storyboarding template with the freedom to create any type of story. They quickly started to come up with ideas like “Choose Your Own Adventure” stories, interactive games, or the classic narrative story.

Here’s the worksheet that Yumi created and shared with her class.

This student created a story about the harmful effects of plastic waste on marine life told from the perspective of a sea turtle.

As students drafted their stories, they turned to Lightwell to make their ideas come to life. Some students even drew their own characters and uploaded it to Lightwell to create custom animations and interactions.

After drawing his characters, this student took a picture with his computer camera and converted the image into a PNG. Very resourceful!

Day 2 and 3: Busy Building Apps

With only a couple of days before the parent showcase, students were fully immersed in creating and testing their app scenes. Many students collaborated with their peers and shared ideas such as including a transition between scenes.

The ability to add logic with visual programming (Version 5.0) allowed students to bring a variety of ideas to life. Some students with prior programming experience used Lightwell’s visual programming interface to add interaction complexity with logic. Other students new to programming used it to add intricate animations and character dialogue into their stories.

Example of our visual programming interface, this student added logic and variables in his app.

Most of them continued to work on it at home even though it wasn’t required!

Day 4: Peer-to-Peer Feedback, Iteration, and App Publishing

Throughout the app development process, all students benefited from peer feedback. They gave and received constructive feedback from their class and continued to iterate on their app before publishing it onto a local class iPad.

Peer-to-Peer Feedback: each student had multiple peers test their app to get collective feedback.

Day 5: Publishing with Xcode for the Parent Showcase

Students finalized their project by adding their App Icon and App Name to their finished Lightwell project. Then, with one click, Lightwell automatically compiled their project into an exportable Xcode project. From there, they used Xcode to publish their app onto a local device and did a final run-through before the showcase.

“I saw him working on this at home. I’m so proud of his work and he programmed it all by himself.”

— A Proud Parent

Students were proud of their work and parents were impressed with entire class during the showcase. Each student surpassed Yumi’s expectations (especially with the short 4-day timeframe from start to finish)!

Of the 14 students in the Digital Storytelling class, 7 students are publishing their apps to the iTunes App Store! Stay tuned as we update this article to include their live app listings.

👉Follow Yumi on twitter @ynakanishi to see all the great things she’s doing at Avenues and how she’s integrating Lightwell in all subject classes.

Questions about Lightwell in Education? Email us at teachers@lightwell.pro or visit us here!