One Tool-Many Paradigms: Creativity and Regularity in Youngsters’ Hyperstories

We investigated 101 online hyperstories created at school by students aged 4-18 using the same authoring tool, to discover recurring characteristics of youngers' hypermedia narratives and their underlying creative process. The findings of our empirical study offer a contribution to the digital storytelling field from a conceptual and a practical perspective. They provide a deeper understanding of digital storytelling activities performed by youngsters in educational settings, highlighting a tension between regularity and creativity that has some correlations with authors' age and school context. In addition, the discovered recurrent features can be used as classification means for digital stories and can be translated into guidelines to support the authoring process and to improve the functionalities of storytelling tools