Learning through the design of interactive stories Exploring the concept of storyworld

Storytelling is widely recognized as a powerful tool to enhance learning, because of its support to meaning making and to the development of expressive (possibly multimodal) skills. An interesting variant to storytelling-based learning activities is the construction of storyworlds apt to support the development of interactive stories. This differs from the design of traditional story plots in that storyworlds represent collections of possibilities to be combined in various ways, rather then pre-defined sequences of events, from which different plots can emerge, at every use of the story, from the interaction between user and story-environment. This contribution aims to reflect on the process of constructing a story world, highlighting how this type of construction implies a different mental activity and skill development than traditional storytelling.