Edmonton, AB-based Story City created an app that allows storytellers in various cities to share interactive, location-specific adventures. It encourages people from all walks of life to create or experience choose-your-own-adventure-style walks in various places across the globe.
Story City’s CEO, Emily Craven, partnered with Liam Newbigging through the Level UP remote internship program to help adapt content to different cities.
Liam, a student at MacEwan University studying journalism, applied his writing skills to create interactive content templates that could be adapted to different cities. He went deep into the production aspects of the interactive content tasks and used his writing and editing skills to recreate pieces that could be adapted to any city. On the project, he learned new geolocation mapping and research skills which he used to determine story location possibilities.
Liam helped Story City prove that story adaptation across multiple locations was possible. He was already a talented writer, honing his skills at university, but working with Story City stretched his abilities to different interactive formats.
“He got hands-on experience in very different formats from what you see in traditional writing and publishing,” Emily shared.
From both sides, communication was the key to success.
“They gave great guidance and through our weekly meetings, communication was really great,” Liam shared.
The guidance and structure Emily offered were helpful, but she was impressed with Liam’s problem-solving skills as his tasks became more challenging.
“He was good at problem-solving before bringing it to the executive team. He would attempt to solve things first on his own and he consistently came up with better solutions,” Emily said.
Emily is grateful for the three projects that Liam completed through the Level UP program.
“His work allowed us to test a bunch of hypotheses we wouldn’t have been able to test ourselves. We used the results to get grants to build new functionality in our platform. Liam’s work proved it was possible to adapt stories to different cities,” Emily shared.
In addition to the benefits he provided Story City, Liam’s Level UP experience gave him professional confidence.
“This project has been really great for my education. I had great hands-on resources and hands-on tools to work with and it’s made me feel like a professional,” Liam said.
Emily echoed Liam’s thoughts on his professional development.
“It was great to work with the same student. We didn’t have to start from scratch and retrain. He was able to build a skillset over the course of the three projects, and he was able to do more complex tasks. If we had a posting, we would 100% hire Liam. He was very reliable and very good at what he was doing.”
Liam is grateful to have worked on Story City’s content project. The experience expanded his writing skills and taught him how valuable production, editing, and research skills are to interactive content creation.
“I absolutely recommend this way of learning to other students. It’s fantastic,” He shared.
Thank you to Liam Newbigging for sharing his experience on Riipen. To learn more about how you can get started with the Level UP remote internship program as a student or employer, visit the website here. Stay up to date with the latest in higher education, experiential learning, and the future of work, subscribe to our bi-weekly newsletter, The Riipen Report.
Riipen Level UP program is funded by the Government of Canada's Innovative Work-Integrated Learning (I-WIL) Initiatives program. The opinions and interpretations in this publication are those of the author and do not necessarily reflect those of the Government of Canada.
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