Branching Paths:
Using Digital Interactive
Storytelling to Engage
Marginalised Young People

In May and June 2022, three teenagers under court orders or police cautions for minor offences came to Bournemouth University to make a film. Not as subjects. As creators.

The project ran over six days, split across two weeks to avoid overwhelming them. They wrote, filmed, and published an interactive digital narrative about bullying, drawing entirely on their own experiences. One became the director, one the lead actor, one the principal scriptwriter. None of this was assigned; it emerged. The project was part of an ongoing community initiative called DISC (Digital Interactive Storytelling in the Community), which has worked with at-risk teens, school students with no interest in higher education, and young people in the justice system.

The paper identifies five pedagogical strategies that proved effective with this group: de-risking autonomy (making creative risk feel safe), flexible scaffolding (clear structure that bends to the individual), modular instruction (teaching just in time, not front-loaded), behaviour modelling (working alongside, not above), and role reinforcement (letting participants discover and own their contributions). The finished interactive narrative remains live online.

Interactive storytelling, it turns out, is unusually good at reaching people who have stopped believing that stories are for them.

When you are the author of a branching narrative, when the choices in the story are choices you designed and the consequences are ones you imagined, the distance between yourself and the work collapses. You are no longer being asked to engage with someone else's meaning. You are making your own.

That is what this project demonstrated: that narrative, structured as participation rather than consumption, can reach people that conventional education cannot. Not because the medium is novel. Because it restores something that disengaged learners have often had taken from them. The sense that their perspective is worth expressing. That their story is worth telling.