How a 7 year old Khana inspired us to Reimagine what story telling/making can be? The story behind the Invention of the Story Maker !
On a usual day back home from the lab, I saw my nephew watching Television. I generally am a no TV person. I experienced the noise and chaos within and outside. I wanted to calm down the external. The Empathetic me wanted to satisfy the need of my nephew as well. His name is Rajveer (Khana) by the way. So I knew his need was Play at that moment. I randomly asked him to make a story from these 5 words. The words were Ram, Pen, Clouds, Bike and Adu (his girl friend 🙂
He resists any conversation when we talk about her name so i quickly eliminated her name and added Pizza. He did not participate so in order to create engagement with him I reversed the role and asked him to give me 5 random names and told him that i will create stories. I did create a story from the few words he gave me. We did this back and forth for sometime and then also included my mother in this play of Making Stories. It was quite a play of relaxation and newness.
Because of that it so happened the next morning I connected Dan Roam’s book back to the Napkin content with yesterday ‘s experience. We have a Game Design section in our lab. While I was going to my office early morning I came up with the Concept of Story Maker. I asked Rajveer (the 7 year old) if he would like to invent this along with me. So we became a team of 2 and then started to prototype a possible board game whose mission would be to enable the story telling ability for its players. We quickly brought Akarshit (the Graphic Designer), Abhishek (The Graphic Designer) and started to make the board design. We played with our prototype and used the skills that we learnt from the Game Design process which we learnt from David Burke book Gamify.
The most unique value of this board game is its ability to make anyone the Story Maker. We generally share stories that we have learnt, heard in the past hardly we come across something that enables us to make stories.
The Story Maker does that. We launched the Story Maker as Khana the Chief Inventor and me as Co Inventor. The 1 week process that we took to make that happen was very fulfilling and it made my day when Khana went to his parents saying that I want to transform the education of the country and make Proactive I available to everyone in the country. His parents did acknowledge the confidence level, Involvement and curiosity of his has shifted drastically. During the Launch Day Khana parents acknowledged Proactive I for instilling the element of Entrepreneurship & Inventorship. Khana is already talking about how we would use funds for our next product while he intends to sell this @ Amazon.
One the birthday of my friend Daughter we thought we would give her the Story Maker. We played together with the entire family. My most satisfying moment was when my friend Jitesh carved out a story by playing the board game. He considers himself the least creative and after playing it, he was like this is Awesome. I knew at that moment that Story Maker is Soulified Verified and will make families and friends more playful, entertaining and unleash their creative souls.
