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“Some of the biggest challenges for me have been looking at story and saying; how can I make it more meaningful? How can I make it more impactful? How can I make stories that have more value?”
Lance Weiler, Author, in The Eye Opener
Laika’s Adventure is an educational experiment that teaches collaboration and problem solving. Children in classrooms more than 1,000 miles apart worked together to help Laika, a robot who had crash landed in Montreal from an alien world, find her way to Los Angeles where a rocket ship was waiting to take her home. “Powering” Laika with their stories, students developed their scientific and creative skills by helping the robot navigate her unfamiliar geography. When Laika reached L.A., she boarded a rocket and was shot into space, along with the children’s stories and work. The project organizers’ hope was that whenever the children who participated looked up into the night sky, they would think of Laika and be reminded of how far their imaginations could carry them.
Experience designer Lance Weiler created Laika’s Adventure. Weiler and his collaborators hope to expand the project into an experiential learning initiative, Robot Heart Stories. This project would use object-based storytelling techniques to foster experience-based learning.