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From watching to talking: seven interactive lessons for K-12

From watching to talking: seven interactive lessons for K-12

More and more educators are discovering the power of interactive story-led experiences for K-12 education.

by Brock Horning | October 2026

Screens in the classroom are getting a hard time, and the worry makes sense: press play on a video and a room full of students goes quiet in the wrong way. Interactive multimedia turns that around.

When the class has to decide together what happens next, the screen becomes something to debate, and the teacher has a way into the conversation. Tools like Stornaway.io let K-12 educators keep the high-quality content they already trust and use it to start conversations in the room.

Here are seven top examples:

Channel 5 & Rebecca Atkinson: Mixmups with Ultra Access®

A pre-school stop-motion series for Channel 5, Mixmups with Ultra Access follows a group of friends exploring different pretend-play scenarios. To reach everyone, children can personalize their experience to meet their accessibility needs and preferences.

Play Mixmups: All Things Pockets on Channel 5
  • The Challenge: To move accessibility features beyond simple subtitles and allow all children to access the TV show in their own way.
  • The Result: For Mixmups with Ultra Access, families can switch on any combination of BSL, Makaton, subtitles, reduced background sound, story intros and sensory props.
  • The Advantage: The anonymized audience data highlights which access features are most needed, helping producers to commission future content with increased accessibility features.

Already internationally recognised through a raft of awards, here’s the story behind the much-needed innovation in accessible TV >

Mark Rober’s Class Crunchlabs: Carnival Mega Plunger

Led by popular YouTuber Mark Rober, Class Crunchlabs takes the free science curriculum to new levels with interactive learning modules and quizzes. Put into Stornaway.io, this science quiz on measuring contact force becomes the entertaining interactive story, Carnival Mega Plunger.

Play Carnival Mega Plunger by Class Crunchlabs
  • The Challenge: To use middle schoolers’ natural curiosity and experimentation to grow their understanding of physics.
  • The Result: Students engage in story-based learning through trial and error in a safe-to-fail environment. A wrong answer shows what happens and lets them try again.
  • The Advantage: The data shows which learning concepts students understand on the first try, which wrong answers are most common, and how many students get it right on the retry, so the Crunchlabs team knows which scenes to rework.

Stratford Festival & Rob Myles: Illuminated Text

How do you engage high school students in the intricacies of Shakespeare’s work when they find it barely understandable? Rob Myles took on this challenge for Stratford Festival, creating an interactive deep dive into Hamlet. With eye-catching calligraphy and dramatic voice performances, students can explore Shakespeare’s work line by line, exploring rhetoric, imagery, sound and rhythm.

Play Illuminated Text by Rob Myles
  • The Challenge: Make Shakespeare’s mastery of the written word accessible and engaging for high school students.
  • The Result: Hosted on Stratford Festival’s Classroom Connect programme, Illuminated Text allows students to explore Hamlet in their own way, breaking down different dimensions of Shakespeare’s work.
  • The Advantage: Understanding which lines and dimensions are most popular with students shows where interest is high and which dimensions can be used to engage students further with Hamlet.

The story behind Illuminated Text >

CVS Health & Discovery Education: Think It Through

Topics like substance misuse can feel like extreme, abstract concepts that are hard to identify in the real world. To overcome this, Discovery Education’s Think It Through plays through realistic scenarios to help students practise safe decision-making.

Click to play the animated scenario training game called "Think It Through"
Play Think It Through by Discovery Education
  • The Challenge: To help high school students identify and avoid substance misuse by demonstrating how it can appear in familiar, realistic scenarios.
  • The Result: Hosted on CVS Health’s free substance misuse resource site, Think It Through is designed to be used in class by teachers to spark discussion.
  • The Advantage: Choices can show where students are leaning towards riskier options. This can tell the education team what to cover in follow-up sessions.

Get all the details on why Think It Through was such a big success >

Discovery Education: Excursions in the United States

Climate and environmental challenges are vast and complex, making them hard to distil into easy-to-digest learning journeys. Excursions in the United States solves this challenge with an interactive map. Students can explore the US’ environmental challenges and possible solutions by following their own curiosity.

Click to play interactive learning and training video that explores the USA.
Play Excursions in the United States by Discovery Education
  • The Challenge: To make a vast and complex topic like environmental challenges and solutions engaging for high school students.
  • The Result: Following their curiosity, each US region’s environmental characteristics, challenges and potential solutions can be explored in any order. Students can go straight to the region that interests them or is most relevant to them.
  • The Advantage: The Discovery Education team can see which regions and topics students open first and how long they stay, to inform future learning content.

Peer Productions: The Forest In Between

Transitioning from primary to secondary education is a big moment. The Forest In Between is a theatre performance helping to address children’s concerns through the story of four friends spending their final summer before secondary school. Designed to spark classroom discussion, students decide what happens next at key moments in the narrative by weighing the options and sharing their views.

A moment from a theatre show for Year 6 students. Two boys look surprised at something off screen.
Find The Forest In Between on Peer Production’s website
  • The Challenge: To address children’s concerns and fears in a way that engages students and helps them practice independence and decision-making skills.
  • The Result: In this interactive story, students can trial different decisions in a safe environment. It allows teachers to address common student concerns through an engaging and relatable story.
  • The Advantage: How students vote at each stage will show which worries are most common in each classroom. This will help teachers plan further sessions which concerns need further sessions.

Bradley Jefferson: Albert’s Riddle

A generative AI film that challenges audiences to solve the classic ‘zebra’ logic puzzle, said to be created by Albert Einstein. After winning Gold at the Seoul International AI Film Festival and Best Interactive Film at the British Film Festival 2025, Albert’s Riddle highlights how AI can be used to create engaging interactive lessons.

Play Albert’s Riddle by Bradley Jefferson
  • The Challenge: To rekindle curiosity in the learning journey and create an engaging learning video without the expense of a full video production crew.
  • The Result: This impressive combination of interactivity and storytelling alongside generative AI highlights how teachers can make interactive lessons – especially in science, maths and ethics.
  • The Advantage: Albert’s Riddle analytics can show which areas or sections confused students, which can inform how future sessions are structured.

Where would you like to go next?

Find out how Stornaway.io can help create interactive K-12 education for your classroom, or go straight to booking a demo from our helpful team.