Elementari is a website for creating and publishing simple interactive and animated digital stories. The story creator, which looks and feels like any presentation or slideshow tool, fuses digital storytelling with important elements of coding and computational thinking. Students create a series of slides featuring text, images, illustrations, sound (including music and voice-over), and code blocks (functions, variables, logic, events, and objects). Creators toggle between a layout design tool that controls the visual elements and an event graph tool that controls the animations, sounds, and interactive elements. These tools allow you to build the two layers of the slides and the finished story. Readers then click through those slides to read through and/or listen to the story. The site comes with a large library of existing media to use in stories, but students can also upload their own illustrations and add their own audio for original content. There’s a nice community of creators that students can participate in to share their own work or to remix/borrow from. Unfortunately, the site currently doesn’t offer detailed control over the publication and permissions of stories, and you can’t keep stories private and only share them with specific people.
For teachers, the site offers the ability to create classrooms to easily check student progress, offer feedback, and showcase student work. For both teachers and students, there are ample support materials to learn key functions of the site and to develop a deeper understanding of key concepts. Since projects can be remixed, those also serve as perfect learning tools. Sample projects come with all needed resources.
Elementari’s versatility as a storytelling platform means that teachers can use it in multiple subjects: in English for story writing or book reports, In History or Geography for research projects about core content, in science for illustrating key concepts, and in language classes for developing fluency. Like Scratch, stories can be remixed, which is a nice feature. Of course, given the integration of coding, Elementari can also serve as a basic introduction to coding concepts, especially scripting, logic, functions/objects/events, sequencing, etc. Though the end result is ultimately a digital story, teachers can use this versatile tool to develop skills in coding and computational thinking. The way Elementari combines writing, voice-over, scripting, art, etc., also lends itself particularly well to cooperative group work and projects.
From an education and teaching point of view, Elementari, first and foremost, is a useful digital storytelling platform, and students can use it to develop and refine key language and writing skills by creating well-told storybooks or projects that showcase learning and illustrate concepts. The platform uses a slideshow metaphor that is easy to use and accessible for children. But where Elementari really shines is in how it folds coding into the storytelling process without making it feel too technical or confusing. And given that the coding is motivated by students’ stories, they’ll be driven to learn those skills to make their projects look and behave how they want. In this way, Elementari has the chance to make coding attractive to a whole new group of students who might normally be disengaged with typical coding lessons.
In summary, Elementari is an easy-to-use and recommended stepping stone for young children to get better at and interested in both writing and coding. Check out this video for a basic overview of this versatile tool.