Frankenstory Founder Visits the Uppers
On a windy and cold Thursday in November, the 8th grade hosted Andrew Duval, a very special visitor who came all the way from Australia to visit! Andrew is one of the creators of the online game Frankenstories, which Uppers have been obsessed with for over a year.
I discovered Frankenstories last year via TikTok and it has taken the Uppers by storm. Every day students ask “Are we going to Frank today?” with desperation in their voices. And when the answer is “yes,” as it often is, the joy and excitement are palpable. The benefits of Frankenstories are many: increased joy in writing, learning to silence our inner critics, reading closely, thinking “beyond the frame” with a story, and community building. Not to mention practice with: reading and responding to prompts, coming up with new ideas, getting ideas on to the paper, editing and reflecting!
The way that Frankenstories works is that students respond to a prompt (usually accompanied by an image) in timed rounds and then vote on each other’s work to select a winner for each round. A typical game lasts five rounds and includes a title. We have been playing this collaborative writing game in Uppers steadily since last fall. Last year’s 8th grade crew created a whole world within our Frankestories, with repeating characters, often drawn from books we were reading in lit. Ask me later about the untold romance between Romeo and PonyBoy from The Outsiders!
Since Frankenstories is still a relatively new game, Andrew had reached out to me previously (as a super-user) for help with beta testing some features to the game. So when he was coming stateside for a conference in Pittsburgh, he asked if he could come visit our school and teach a lesson with a group of kids. After making sure he knew that Pittsburgh was not exactly close by, we accepted with glee! We were basically hosting a celebrity!
Our afternoon with Andrew will stay with us all for a long time. He led us through a new Frankenstories game, a highly structured template where we created an urban-legend style monster. Her name is Fantima and she haunts the parking lot at Applebee’s, where she was a disgruntled employee who met an untimely demise. You better tip well and be nice to the servers, or else Fantima will get you! We paused a lot while writing/playing and got pointers and tips from Andrew. He helped us focus on story throughlines and reminded us to add juicy details and think carefully about our votes. He was serious but joyful, strict but silly, a perfect match for our class.
After school, Andrew and I were able to debrief and discuss the role and uses of Frankenstories in the classroom. We compared it to improv and discussed the importance of inventiveness and bravery in writing. As much as we like being flexible and accommodating at Center School, sometimes having strict time limits and rules leads to maximum creativity! We talked about collaborative writing as a tool for building community through group storytelling. He helped remind me to take time to set goals with the kids and to set lofty goals, reminding them that we’ll need to all work together to achieve them. He helped me strategize some ways to support kids when the competition starts to feel more important than the experience. We could have talked for hours! It was truly one of the highlights of my professional life, getting to dig deep with a colleague about all of my favorite topics: writing, reading, creativity, middle schoolers, group building, and fun.
Andrew gifted us a Franky stuffie, who has made himself at home in our classroom. With Franky (and Andrew) watching over us, our writing is already soaring to new heights!
