Storyboarding and games

My son, has been asking us to tell stories about various characters he likes from TV or from video games. In recent months he's also been making up his own stories, so I've been helping him to record them in story board form. This story board is the latest evolution of a story he's telling about a character from a game on my T-Mobile Sidekick phone called Bob. Bob is a ball that bounces around from world to world trying to avoid sharp things that can pop him. His goal is to find his little girl friend.

It's a lot of fun for me to do this because it helps him visualize the stories he creates with his imagination. In the beginning he was asking us to tell him stories, but it's really nice to hear his stories, especially for the games. They're often very different, but simple worlds that would be fun to play if they were ever realized. He still does ask us to tell him stories, but somehow I find his to be much more exciting.

Story telling, game playing and literacy

We did a variation of this kind of story recording a few months ago where he would make up sentences and I would type them on my Mac. Then we would have the Mac speak the sentences for us. We mostly got to laugh at the way the computer spoke, but he also got to type letters. He's actually been able to type his name for a few months now. It's funny that the first time I saw him write a word was to type it rather than to write it. He does write letters on his Magnadoodle, but since games are his thing, it's not surprising that he learned to memorize words while playing a game.

Banner ads are good for something

Another interesting technology-related story has to do with how L is starting to recognize letter forms. Last summer he was picking out the word "pizza", I think because of the occurrence of the double z in the middle of the word. We had been playing a game by Living Books called "Arthur's Reading Race" and pizza comes up there often. But he had read it in another context, so I could only guess that he remembered it from that game.

Another funny example happened last week when we were in my home office. I had this screen up on my Mac because I was browsing Moviefone for movie listings in the neighborhood.

When he was playing he was looking at the screen and said, "That says, 'No'". I looked up to see the big word No in the banner ad on the right. I guess banner ads are good for something. I think that one is easy to recognize because on games you are presented with a dialog window asking you to answer yes or no.

The article e

Last funny tech-related reading bit is that inexplicably, L started substituting the letter E for the words A and The. So he'll say something like "here's e toy for you". Hearing "e" after all of the words, I feel like he would have been a good person to go to during those .com days, because he's come up with some interesting e words. Though, it seems nowadays, the only "e" brand that sticks in my mind is eBay. Anyway, that's enough for now.