How might we reinvent the way children discover and learn about cultural diversity?

Something’s Different Today is an educational, interactive, animated e-book app, exposing children to cultural diversity through storytelling.

Bachelor Thesis: BA Digital Media, Animation and Game
Hochschule Darmstadt
3 Months (Individual)


Winner of Future Award 2015, in the category Education, Frankfurt, Germany, 2015

Experience Trailer

Problem Area

We are told different versions of the same fact or ‘story’ about groups of people through media. We slowly form them as a certain image in our heads over time. With incomplete information and thus, the inability to make fair judgments about that what is different from ourselves, we make largely innocent stereotypes, but stereotypes nonetheless. We generalise people and places as being a ‘single story’ in our minds.

“The single story creates stereotypes, and the problem with stereotypes is not that they are untrue, but that they are incomplete. They make one story become the only story.”
-Chimamanda Adichie

Designing a Solution

Stories have the ability to break down borders and help children see a reflection of themselves in the characters. More importantly, a good story lets one know individuals as a person and catch a glimpse into their courage and conflicts - thus, teaching children to identify and tackle stereotype and biases.
Something’s Different Today is an educational, interactive, animated e-book app, exposing children to cultural diversity through storytelling. The story follows the adventures of Amelia around the world.

Strategy

The backbone of the e-book is the one-on-one conversations with local children and the resulting reflection on the experience with the grandmother.

While the focus of the e-book is to teach kids about different countries, geography, culture, languages, cuisines, clothing and festivals, the most significant emphasis is to make them reflect on the similarities rather than differences in children their age all around the world.

The e-book offers a more complete story in contrast to the single story stereotypes. Gamification elements irk the child’s curiosity and encourages them to immerse in the storyworld, being able to ask questions and complete interactive tasks to get to know different cultures through a local child. The first city in the e-book is Mumbai, India.

The story is a mixture of a partially interactive, animated linear narrative and exploratory interactive cityscapes with a local character in each city to show the protagonist around.

Each trip is followed by another reflective narrative that drives home the observations and experiences with cultural learning. This allows elements of fantasy, receiving personalised information, making observations and offers a balance between static narration and control to the user.