Excavating the secrets, scandals, and untold stories hiding below the surface of life, and giving voice to the characters who make or made those hiStories happen.
Newsflash! On 24 March 2014, at the Bologna Children’s Book Fair, I will be announcing the official launch of my twin digital imprints, Time Traveler Tours & Tales. Finally!
I wanted to share the news first with my dedicated blog readers.
Team TTT&T now joins forces with Ronald Ashri and the creative digital development agency, Bluespark Labs, to power up the Time Traveler Tours concept and vision with a spanky new app publishing engine.
Blending the talents of our respective teams, we will collaborate to unite the best in interactive storytelling with the latest in mobile technology to revolutionize the discovery of history and culture, and along with it, educational tourism.
Or aim: To produce interactive mobile tours—both branded as well as white-label—to the world’s most popular historic destinations, museums, and other cultural institutions. Content for our branded StoryApp iTineraries will spring from the interactive iTales now under development under the aegis of Time Traveler Tales.
Our target audience: Youth. And the young at heart.
Our mission: To bring history and culture to life through story and games, at the tips of your fingers.
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Time Traveler Tours mobile publications usher users on treasure hunts through time, guided by history’s most colorful characters. Our debut StoryApp iTinerary, ParisAppTours: Beware Madame la Guillotine, A Revolutionary Tour of Paris, earned numerous Top 10 App distinctions and garnered stellar reviews, such as this one by Daryl Grabarek, reviewer for School Library Journal's Touch & Go, Guide to the Best Apps for Children and Teens:
“Drama of historical proportions, an awesome guide, and games and challenges, what more could a teen on vacation ask for?”
The award-winning story kicked off the creation of a suite of digital products—for tablet and eReader— along with the birth of a second digital imprint, Time Traveler Tales. Our eTales will also be available for print, on demand through Amazon. With our stories now traversing the formats, we are able to bring quality interactive content to all readers where they want it most.
A growing alliance of authors of narrative nonfiction and historical fiction is now fast at work, helping to position Time Traveler Tours & Tales to scale its unique concept worldwide. And to our great fortune, Bluespark Labs boasts a special affinity for international travel and culture. Merging thoughtful user experiences, beautiful interface designs, and powerful web and mobile platforms, they design and build apps that people love.
Bluespark Founder & Principal, Michael Tucker, was taken with the Time Traveler Tours concept from the early beta-testing days of the Beware Madame la Guillotine StoryApp iTinerary, when he accidentally shared a day out and about in Paris with Sarah and her story’s protagonist, Charlotte Corday.
Now he and his partner, Ronald Ashri, have engaged their team to power up the Time Traveler Tours app publishing engine with state-of-the-art features and functionality. You can meet the whole team here.
The coming technical platform will enable Team TTT&T to produce interactive mobile media at a competitive cost. This will include content published under the Time Traveler Tours trademark, as well as that tailor-made to highlight the historical legacy of museums, monuments, and other cultural institutions, worldwide.
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Cultural Institutions: Are you looking for an affordable solution to building interactive apps and other educational media for your organization? You need search no further. Engage us! It's what we do best.
Authors: Do you have a dramatic historic tale to tell? Consider joining Team TTT&T! We are open for submissions.
For more information about our collaborative opportunities for authors and organizations, contact me!
My fellow judges and I were handed a quite varied list of five short-listed titles, including two apps for the very young, Endless Alphabet and Wee You-Things, and two apps for a much older audience, To This Day and Cornelia Funke’s Mirror World.
But we all agreed that the standout app among the five was a gorgeously rendered and extremely intuitive app that is sure to appeal to the whole family, from pre-readers to grandparents, alike.
We therefore proudly offer the 2013 CYBILS Award for the Book App category to Disney Animated by Touch Press, the leader in book app design and production today, IMHO.
Here is the judges’ collective statement:
“Disney Animated brings to life the outstanding animation heritage of Disney Studios through the expertise of Touch Press, one of the most exacting and innovative developers in the app space today. Appealing to the entire family, Disney Animated meets all the criteria we seek in outstanding interactive media. The technical elements are impeccably rendered, the interactive elements are directly linked to the content, and the narrative content is endlessly fascinating. From stills to studies, animated shorts, soundtracks, interviews, and games that illustrate the points being made, you will have trouble putting this app down.
Disney Animated cries out to be revisited again and again, revealing new insights with each reading. Like any good non-fiction book, you can read this app in linear or non-linear fashion. It drives the reader to explore and experiment. Interactive workshops built into the app not only give hands-on explanations of how animation works, they challenge our understanding of physics in a game-like way. The app makes every use of the medium, animating just about everything, even the text! You can pinch, enlarge, move, examine and share just about everything in this app. What better way to discover animation than through animation itself, but powered by the reader!
With Disney Animated, Touch Press models what the digital environment is capable of and what a truly great book app can be.”
— Cybils 2013 Book App Judges
For more information on this year's Cybils honorees, head on over to our official website. There, you will find titles to keep you and your young readers happy and occupied with great content for a long time!
Big thanks to all the many volunteers -- judges, panelists, and organizers -- who made another successful Cybils year possible. And to Mary Ann Scheuer of GreatKidBooks for herding us all to the finish line!
I just love my tète à tètes with Roxie Munro. We always seem to encourage one another to dig deeper, to think more clearly about what we are doing and who we are serving.
Our latest chat had us defining the terms "transmedia" vs. "crossmedia." We even threw in "multimedia" just to round out the discussion.
These terms seem to be used at times interchangeably, at other times to express entirely different things. Even at the Oct 2012 StoryDrive Conference on "Transmedia Storytelling" at the Frankfurt Book Fair, presentations flitted from creating story worlds to promoting content through subsidiary merchandising to everything in between.
Surely they can't all be one and the same?
So I did my homework -- read a bunch of books and attended a ton of workshops -- and I talked to a lot of people, including Roxie. And here's my take on how we should be using these terms...
Transmedia Storytelling is when a story exists on several platforms, BUT on each platform a different aspect of the story is being told. Taken together, all story strands create a story world, but each story can hold its own on its own. It can be a complete experience alone or become a broader experience as part of the greater whole.
Example: The Matrix. Three movies plus two official gaming environments plus several comic books. A particular character walks off screen in movie 1 and into the gaming world where more of the Matrix story is revealed and lives side-by-side movie 2, in which this character plays no role at all. Then, as if stepping out of the game world and back into the screen, she reappears in movie 3. That's transmedia storytelling, without question.
Crossmedia, on the other hand, is when you take a story, like Roxie's Doors or Beware Mme la Guillotine or The Fantastic Flying Books of Mr Morris Lessmore, and apply it, with some adaptions to fit the format, to another medium.
Roxie's Doors is a picture book and an app. The two are different products, obviously, and the creative content is treated differently in each, but the story is largely the same in both media.
Beware Madame la Guillotine is currently a storyapp and an interactive eBook and is in development as both plain-text eBook and dual-language print book. The purposes for each of these publications is slightly different as are their target audiences. But the story remains the story from format to format.
This is also true for Morris Lessmore. Though the animated short,storybook app, picture book, and augmented reality app all boast special elements thanks to the various capabilities of each medium in which the story resides, the story itself doesn't really change. There are no new story strands or plot lines or characters.
These are all fine examples of crossmedia storytelling, the purpose of which seems to be to get quality content to the reader/users where they most wish to enjoy it.
Multimedia, to round out this discussion, means using more than one medium in the same place, i.e., bringing multiple media to a single device. An interactive eBook wherein the main character accesses a particular YouTube selection, or sends a tweet or posts to Facebook is a prime example of multimedia storytelling if the videos and tweets and posts remain unchanging and essential to the storytelling in their proscribed form. If, however, the main character has his/her own twitter and FB accounts and is posting and tweeting outside the story, perhaps as a way to engage with fans and/or provide story clues or back-story, etc., that would be transmedia storytelling.
And then there is merchandising, which is not storytelling at all, thank you very much. It falls into none of the above categories. But is being referred to, wrongly, and by many, as "transmedia" or "crossmedia." (The same people also tend to use these two terms interchangeably. Again, in my opinion, wrongly.)
Example: Star Wars. You have the movies. Then you have the myriad books which tell different stories connected to the greater world, like what happened to Princess Leia and Han Solo. This is transmedia storytelling. But then you have the Princess Leia doll. That's merchandising. Then you have the book version of each movie: crossmedia. Then you have the game that takes you to some galaxy featured in the movies, but expands on the story of that galaxy to create a whole new story: transmedia.
The 5th Magic-Making factor of this series has the user making decisions about how to interact with the media product at their fingertips. And this, dear readers, was perhaps the most profound learning of all learnings at the 2013 Annual Dust or Magic Institute: That we've returned to the most early essentials of game play with the best of today's interactive digital media.
Once upon a time, a parent purchased a big box of multicolored LEGO bricks of varying sizes. The lucky recipient tore open the box and spilled the many pieces onto the floor. Then alone or in the company of others, he or she set about to build something from the imagination: a town, an imaginary animal, a flying car. When done, the creation was broken apart and the process of creation began all over again.
Over the years, LEGOS became increasingly linked to blockbuster movies and televised content. The result being that what you can create now with a particular boxed set of bricks is more often than not predetermined by the manufacturer. Instead of throwing caution to the wind and letting creativity dictate the story in the bricks, the user is now obligated to follow an instruction booklet to build something specific. Upon completion, the creation earns pride of place on a shelf where it commences to collect dust until the next theme-driven box of LEGOS arrives home to replace it.
In today's most successful interactive children's media, however, choice is returned to the user, who is empowered to interact with the product in creative ways. Whether in games, online meeting places, interactive story books, educational websites, or products targeted to learning environments, the user/reader/gamer/player/learner has the power to decide once again.
Take Minecraft as an example. It's LEGOS on the screen, people! LEGOS on steroids! The environment just goes and goes and goes. The choices you can make are infinite. Within specific conditions and under game-determined potential threats, YOU get decide what you want to build, what you can build it out of, where you should build it, etc., depending on the aspect of the gaming world you venture into.
What's more, as with the original LEGOS, Minecraft can be played alone and socially. And because it's online, you don't have to be in the same room to scratch that social itch anymore.
Because here's Magic-Making Factor #6: We are social animals. Always have been. Always will be. We are social animals that love, and need, to play.
Play is something we humans do to learn and to be in community with others, and, of course, to relax. It's an essential part of growing up, but it's something we never really grow out of, if we're lucky. Our games may change as we age, and our tools may change as we develop as a species, but our need to play with others and the pleasure we derive from it never ever goes away.
Returning to Minecraft and why it Is so important as a model for interactive product developers: Minecraft is popular because it can be played socially. But it's addictive because it's empowering, and not just within the game.
"Minecrafters" can take Minecraft code, which is open-source, and create their own versions of the game. This spurs true engagement, tapped by intrinsic motivation. Users learn through play in the very best sense of the expression. Because they want to.
Serious Minecrafters are not just enjoying a little down time with friends. And they're certainly not "wasting" time in front of a screen. They are figuring out, on a technical level, such things as gaming mechanics, 3D modeling, APIs, protocol analysis, and environment integration -- all the stuff of a degree in software engineering. They're solving engineering questions by brainstorming solutions to real world questions and applying them to an imaginary world of their making. On a human level, they are gaining confidence in themselves and learning how to collaborate with others. They are tapping the foundations of the creative process, every time they play, by experimenting, testing, failing, trying again, and eventually succeeding before moving on to the next challenge.
They are constructing, one pixelated block at a time, an internal world of knowing that they will carry with them into the future.
And that is pure magic. What we should all be striving for in our tools and products.
Now, I'm off to re-think the Time Traveler Tours and Time Traveler Tales' models. I think it's about time I Level-Up!
Technology + Learning Theory + Play Theory = Magic.
A major focus of the Dust or Magic Institute is to bring educators and technologists together in the same space, and to provide the latter with a crash course in Childhood Development. Why? So that they may create age- and developmentally-appropriate products for kids, steeped in sound educational theory. The most important one being that all of us, kids and adults alike, learn best through play.
As a teacher of 20+ years, I was gratified to discover educational theory being applied to children’s interactive media in this way.
However, lacking in the above equation, I felt, was the time-honored lesson to be drawn from the world of children’s publishing: that the visual element serves a valuable role too, and one often neglected in today's interactive media for kids.
As a children’s author and a connoisseur of picture book art, I was shocked by the low visual quality of some of the media products we studied at Dust or Magic. Many of them, I’m sorry to say, were just plain ugly, with illustrations that looked little better than clip art.
Anyone working on behalf of children must appreciate the role that great illustration plays in communicating with and teaching children. In illustrated books, the story and images weave seamlessly together to create something better than the sum of their parts. Indeed, great illustrations tell at least 50% of the story and can make an already great text shine even brighter.
Yet, this is not often the case in today’s digital products.
Not all children’s digital media will contain story. They don’t all have too. But digital media are nothing if not visual. It is imperative, therefore, that we developers make our products visually appealing. To make them works of art.
Beware Madame la Guillotine, for example, is illustrated with great period masterpieces as well as propaganda and popular lithographs dating to the French Revolution. While we place an emphasis on the history as revealed by the story and accompanying treasure hunts, and not on the art per se, the app is also a subtle lesson in Art History. And we trust that this will be understood on some level by each of our user/readers.
Our kids deserve the total package. It’s not enough to be age appropriate and steeped in sound educational theory. Our products must also be beautiful.
Nosy Crow and Touch Press set the standard in this regard, as do the apps by OCG Studios, illustrated by Roxie Munro. Their products combine great storytelling with gorgeous illustrations, topped off with interactive gaming elements that enhance the narrative and extend learning.
At the Dust or Magic Institute, participants rate demoed products on a scale of one to ten – one being “dust” and ten being “magic”. Judging criteria are not provided, so it’s hard to know what’s behind each participant’s decision. But I'll admit to aiming my laser beam low (see video above for explanation) for any product – even the most educationally sound – if it did not deliver a quality visual experience as well.
As a children’s author, app developer, educator, and burgeoning digital publisher, I feel most days as if I am contorted on a Twister board, struggling to maintain a viable position; or drifting the northern seas with each of my two feet and hands clinging to a different iceberg, each ice floe representing one the four elements -- educational theory, great story content, and compelling visuals -- I hope to bring together in my ambition to produce quality interactive product for kids.
But it can, and must, be done. As Warren Buckleitner, himself, beseeched us at the close of the 2013 Institute: “Go forth and do right by the kids!”
It is my hope that developers of children's interactive digital media will take a minute to hire a proper illustrator for their future projects. Following on that, I hope that the opening equation of Dust or Magic 2014 be modified as well to read Technology + Learning Theory + Play Theory + High Quality Visual Art = Magic.
What do you think? Should digital media for kids honor a visual aesthetic? Please leave a comment and tell us what you think.
