The Story Collider is dedicated to true, personal stories about science. We host regular live shows across the US and UK, and produce a weekly podcast. We believe everybody has a story about science, because now, more than ever, science is a part of all of our lives.
Starting off class with 10 minutes of writing, using one of the prompts below. If you'd like, you can ask a volunteer to share their story! Students may be surprised by the variety of stories that are written based on the same prompt.
Take inspiration from classics like Treasure Island and newer popular series like The Bad Guys to explore how to write thrilling adventure stories. And to encourage students to begin writing their own adventure-focused stories, share these creative story starters:
There is a witch who lives in a nearby legendary haunted house. She puts a hex on you that needed to be broken by the time the clock struck midnight the next night. What kind of hex is it, and how do you break it?
Stories provide just enough information for business and technical people to understand the intent. Details are deferred until the story is ready to be implemented. Through acceptance criteria and acceptance tests, stories get more specific, helping to ensure system quality.
Often, stories are first written on an index card or sticky note. The physical nature of the card creates a tangible relationship between the team, the story, and the user: it helps engage the entire team in story writing. Sticky notes also offer other benefits: they help visualize work and can be readily placed on a wall or table, rearranged in sequence, and even passed off when necessary. Stories allow an improved understanding of the scope and progress:
User stories are the primary means of expressing needed functionality. They essentially replace the traditional requirements specification. In some cases, however, they serve as a means to explain and develop system behavior later recorded in specifications supporting compliance, suppliers, traceability, or other needs.
Good stories require multiple perspectives. In Agile, the entire team creates a shared understanding of what to build to reduce rework and increase throughput. Teams collaborate using Behavior-Driven Development (BDD) to define detailed acceptance tests that definitively describe each story.
Agile Teams automate acceptance tests wherever possible, often in business-readable, domain-specific language. Automation creates an executable specification to validate and verify the solution. Automation also provides the ability to quickly regression-test the system, enhancing Continuous Integration, refactoring, and maintenance.
Instead, it is understanding the real objective of the code. Therefore, investing in good user stories, albeit at the last responsible moment, is a worthy effort for the team. Bill Wake coined the acronym INVEST [1] to describe the attributes of a good user story.
Example: Assuming a six-person team composed of three developers, two testers, and one PO, with no vacations or holidays, then the estimated initial velocity = 5 8 points = 40 points/iteration. (Note: Adjusting slightly lower may be necessary if one of the developers and testers is also the Scrum Master/Team Coach.)
Note: SAFe Team Kanban teams typically spend less time estimating stories than scrum teams do. In the Kanban flow-based model, work items or stories are typically split and sized so that the team can generally deliver a story within a few days. In the context of SAFe where teams need to participate in iteration planning and assign stories to future iterations, some notion of sizing is required.
SAFe Kanban teams may initially use estimating poker or a similar mechanism to size their stories. More likely, however, they develop a sense of breaking work into stories that are similar in size, as that assists flow in general and assures that no large story blocks other stories that also need to make their way through the Kanban system. As they understand their velocity, they are able to understand how many stories they can deliver in a unit of time, allowing them to place stories in iterations during PI Planning and to be able to make commitments to other teams as to when specific stories would be available.
For teams doing regular maintenance and support activities, estimating their normal backlog items often has less value. In many cases, these teams do not estimate this type of response work. However, all teams have retro items, potential improvements to their CD pipeline, and other significant tasks that require attention, scheduling, and estimating.
Things make sense when we know what we should regard as normal and what we should be surprised at. Indeed, the very possibility of people remarking on something is a measure of how surprising or exceptional (literally, remarkable) it is. Unexpected events make stories interesting. This is even registered in the brain activity that accompanies surprise. Consider this:
This is not the only physiological effect of surprise. Our skin conductance increases. Our heart rate changes. Our blood vessels constrict. When things go against our expectations, we respond physically. Even minor transgressions of expectation affect us directly, and this helps to explain why we pay attention to them and why, in turn, they have the mutual prominence needed to serve as landmarks in coordination games.
Cognitive scientist Olivier Morin and colleagues sought to explain not only why we like to read about murder and mayhem but also why we enjoy the kind of harrowing and emotional fiction that tragedy presents:
Other researchers have converged on the story-as-simulator idea, arguing that stories allow us to vicariously live through experiences we might not want to undergo ourselves. By following stories about the dramatic and the dangerous, we train, develop, and hone our social, emotional, and cognitive skills, and we prepare for real-world encounters and possible futures.
Folk tales like this are said to have saved lives during the tsunami of late 2005 that hit Thailand, Indonesia, Sri Lanka, and the Nicobar and Andaman Islands. Similar stories are heard in Aboriginal Australia, Sri Lanka, the Northwest Pacific region of North America, and New Zealand.
The Australian flood stories are grounded in real events. They align with independent paleogeographic evidence about historical changes in sea levels and associated flooding. But there are of course many cultural origin stories that do not concur with known scientific evidence or that may seem more far-fetched, metaphors at best. Here are two stories that I have heard about the deep history of the people I work with in upland Laos.
Once upon a time, the Kri had a way of writing their language down. But they had no paper. Instead, they wrote on buffalo hides. One day, dogs ate the hides and the writing was lost forever. That is why, today, Kri speakers have no way of writing their language.
The greatest threats to story stewardship are the two near enemies of building narrative trust: narrative tap-out and narrative takeover. Rather than building trust by acknowledging, affirming, and believing, we shut people down when we experience discomfort or disinterest, or when we take over the narrative and make it about us or our perception of what happened.
By the time I was 14, I was severely depressed and had given up: I stopped going to school; I stopped going outside. I just stayed in my room, avoiding my mother, playing video games, getting lost in my favorite music, and surfing the internet.
The consequences of what happened to me have been profound: possible infertility, loss of my breasts and inability to breastfeed, atrophied genitals, a permanently changed voice, facial hair. When I was seen at the Tavistock clinic, I had so many issues that it was comforting to think I really had only one that needed solving: I was a male in a female body. But it was the job of the professionals to consider all my co-morbidities, not just to affirm my nave hope that everything could be solved with hormones and surgery.
Last year, I became a claimant against the Tavistock and Portman NHS Foundation Trust in a judicial-review case, which allows petitioners in Britain to bring action against a public body they deem to have violated its legal duties. Few judicial reviews get anywhere; only a fraction obtain a full hearing. But ours did, with a panel of three High Court judges considering whether youths under treatment at the clinic could meaningfully consent to such medical interventions.
Over the next couple of years, my voice deepened further, my beard came in, and my fat redistributed. I continued to wear my breast binder every day, especially now that I was completely passing as male, but it was painful and obstructed my breathing. By the time I was 20, I was being treated at the adult clinic. The testosterone and the binder affected the appearance of my breasts, and I hated them even more. I also wanted to align my face and my body, so got a referral for a double mastectomy.
I started realizing how many flaws there had been in my thought process, and how they had interacted with claims about gender that are increasingly found in the larger culture and that have been adopted at the Tavistock. I remembered my idea as a 14-year-old, that hormones and surgery would turn me into someone who appeared to be a man. Now, I was that person. But I recognized that I was very physically different from men. Living as a trans man helped me acknowledge that I was still a woman.
Then there was the fact that no one really knew the long-term effects of the treatment. For instance, the puberty blockers and testosterone caused me to have to deal with vaginal atrophy, a thinning and fragility of the vaginal walls that normally occurs after menopause. I started feeling really bad about myself again.
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