Transmedia Case Study: The Three Little Pigs

If the Three Little Pigs were told as a transmedia story it might be designed like this: The basic story would be told in an anchoring medium, such as a novel, TV show, or film. In this case, it’s a short story.There are four primary characters to expand and explore: three pigs and a wolf. There are also deeper themes of hard work, planning, collaboration, family and persistence underlying the main story arc.The first round of expansion: Pig 1 has a blog which details the family history and complicated family dynamics that led to the pigs decision to live apart rather than together. The hypothetical transmedia version of the Three Little Pigs is not the repurposing of story across different platforms. Developers could decide if participant interaction, such as solving the sustainable materials problem, finding the wolf through clues and maps, or creating another character for the story, could move the story in different directions than the original version.

Transmedia in the Classroom Transmedia and Education: How Transmedia Is Changing the Way We Learn For one language arts class project, a middle school teacher in Shelburne, Virginia, Chad Sansing, asks his sixth graders to read Peter Cherches’s 1986 poem “Lift Your Right Arm,” and then translate it into computer code. The poem occurs in action sequences—for example, “Lift your right arm, she said./I lifted my right arm.” Sansing and his class conceive a list of actions, sketch ideas of how to code them, using icons or letters, and then code the poem. In doing so, the students become producers of both a new language and way of seeing poetry. Sansing’s students have also translated the poem’s code into Scratch, to create animation, and into LEGO Mindstorms EV3, a robot-programming language. What is the point of this activity? Transmedia, a broad descriptive word that literally translated means “across media” and encompasses many strategies that transverse industries, is generally regarded as the use of multiple media platforms to tell a story or story experience.