Teaching with Frankenstories ARCHIVED 202404

While Frankenstories games can be customised in all sorts of ways, these are the default settings:

• 5 rounds (+1 title round)
• 280 characters per round (+1 limit break per player)
• 100 seconds writing per round (+50% bonus time in R1&2)
• 100 seconds voting per round (+50% bonus time in R1&2)
• Players only see 4 randomly-assigned peer replies in each voting round (to prevent reading overwhelm)
• Random narrative prompt
• Approval mode (i.e. reply moderation) is switched off (to keep the game moving)

And a casual game has the following properties:

• Players join using a game code rather than by logging in.
• By default, players create throwaway usernames, or you can enable the random name generator. 

For an average class size, a standard game takes ~30 minutes to complete.

(A small group can finish in < 25 minutes, but large groups create more tiebreaker voting rounds.)

Want a shorter game?

• Try 3 writing rounds instead of 5.

Review and possibly re-roll the random prompt before you play

• Random prompts are a random combination of text and image.
• If you don’t like the prompt or don't think it's appropriate for your class, you can re-roll the text, image, or both.
• You can also choose image and text themes for random prompts.

Swear filter and waving

These are two useful default settings, but you can change them if you want:

• The swear filter swaps swear words for **** (though it's not foolproof).
• Waving is fun in small remote groups, but can be annoying in a big class because students spam the wave button.

Consider the maturity of your class

As a teacher in a casual game, you have little control once you start playing apart from the ability to end the game or remove disruptive players.

If you're not comfortable affording that level of autonomy, consider jumping straight to Game 3: Approval mode (though still read about Games 1&2).

• Give students the 6-digit game code and have them click to join the game from the Frankenstories home page.