ImproviNation is an approach that uses improvisation and storytelling to promote creativity, problem-solving, collaboration, and language skills in students. Teachers can design curriculum around improvisational activities that challenge students to build on each other's ideas to create coherent narratives. This encourages students to develop novel ideas, communicate effectively, and contribute to group success.

1. ImproviNation
Teaching Serendipitous Thinking
Kids of all ages improvise stories as a way of making sense • Promotes creativity
of the world. While a natural part of play, this exercise in • Develops problem-solving
spontaneous problem-solving, reasoning, social relating
and language mastery might go overlooked or even be
• Requires collaboration
suppressed in traditional school environments. • Framework for curricula
ImproviNation helps teachers use improvisation as an • Easy to implement
entry point for teaching an array of social and language
skills, while growing a learner’s ability to adapt.
ImproviNation is an approach for designing curriculum that promotes a mastery of story-telling and
improvisation. ImproviNation activities challenge learners to tell or perform a portion of a dialogue or story, but
to improvisationally connect their portion to the ideas of others telling the story, in an e ort to ensure that the
entire narrative makes sense. This encourages learners to create novel but relevant ideas, to e ectively
communicate those ideas and to seed ideas in others. The objective being that kids rise to new challenges, can
adapt to changing situations, can relate to the perspectives and intentions of others, and can contribute to
success of the collective.
FableMake
This group story-telling kit (physical cards, website, tablet app, or mobile app) provides di erent Sequences
from a library of random illustrations, photographs or video clips. Though unrelated, the charge to learners is to
imagine the Sequence as scenes of a larger story. Scene-by-scene, and using the images as a departure point,
each member of a group must tell a portion of the story. Each must take into account the preceding narrative,
and make natural segues to their own image, while leaving the story line open for the following participant. This
exercise is complete when the Sequence ends and a coauthored, coherent story exists. Once done, groups can
pass their Sequence to another group who will repeat the same exercise. Afterwards, groups can present and
compare the di ering stories with the same Sequence. The di culty can be increased by adding time limits, by
using more abstract imagery, or more disparate imagery. Learners could also be asked to draw, paint,
photograph the artwork used as scenes in FableMake. FableMake can scale to multiple schools and
communities of learners as they could also share, rate, and add onto stories from a database. The FableMake
platform could be used to guide dialogue around an array of subject matter. By imposing a conceptual topic
(Your story must be about Gravity, Your story must be about Justice, Your story must use Adverbs) as a
constraint on story-telling, teachers can frame learners’ thinking.
PiggyBack
A game teachers can play to teach conversational improv. When a student speaks, they must begin their
sentence with the last word spoken by another person. These types of smaller games can happen at random to
keep kids engaged with the subject matter, their individual ideas, and what’s being said by their peers.
BuildOnIt
BuildOnIt is a problem-solving kit providing groups a set of random objects and assignments to solve a specific
problem with them (create a bridge, create a cup holder, create a necklace). Groups with the same task and set
of objects can compare solutions and discuss their thought process afterwards. Groups can be posed with a
new challenge to solve but by using the same set of random objects.