Project Demo
Brett Pierce
Executive Director
Steel River Productions
Biography
Brett Pierce is a program developer, producer and educator who has spent over 25 years working in media production that entertains around a defined curriculum.
Abstract
Meridian Stories is a series of bi-monthly digital storytelling competitions for schools. Each competition challenges teams of Middle and High School students to create short-form stories using images, words, video and music in the service of core curricular objectives. Incentives to succeed include a tiered badge system that rewards teams for content, storytelling and media mastery.
Meridian Stories is a response to this question: How do we get adolescent youth to channel the massive energy that is expended online away from extensions of their social lives and toward deeper explorations of meaningful content? The digital resources at their disposal are without precedent. But the youth are not being guided to use these inimitable resources to advance social responsibility, global awareness, communal participation and educational mastery.
This initiative is in its second pilot year involving 25 Middle and High schools. Challenges ask student teams to create everything from an Exponential Growth Game Show to an Edgar Allen Poe horror scene; a radio drama about a severe eco-disruption to a photographic mythological storyboard from a non-Greek or Roman myth.
This project demo will feature the Challenges, the student submissions, the support material created and the new educational data supporting the integration of this transmediated approach in formal and informal learning environments.