Bringing Stories to Life: Our Co-Creation Journey With Local Students in Barcelona
Co-creation workshops of TechTales with children
Fab Lab Barcelona recently hosted one of the co-creation workshops of TechTales, a storytelling project that reimagines classic tales and invites children to reshape them in their own voices. We guided a group of 6- and 7-year-olds through a creative journey that combined story reading, illustration, sound-making, acting, and animation.
This journey of bringing stories to life began with a moment of quiet focus: a shared reading of the tale “Desiree and the Snow Queen”. The story follows Desiree, a girl with Down’s syndrome, who finds the strength to fight for her friendship with a boy named Ethan. From the very first session, the children were drawn into Desiree’s world, ready to explore and reimagine it through their own creativity.
The following day, the story started to transform as we explored how emotions can be expressed visually. Using scenes and character descriptions, the children imagined what feelings look like and translated them into drawings, bringing Desiree’s journey to life on paper.
In the third session, the tale gained voice. We shifted from drawing to speaking and listening with a simple game: say the same sentence using an emotion chosen at random. Laughter and dramatic performances quickly filled the room. Then came one of their favourite discoveries — creating sound effects. Children rubbed, tapped, shook, and crumpled different objects, testing which noises matched the scenes and proudly recording their results.
By the final session, the story was ready to move. We introduced stop-motion animation, and the children selected the scenes they wanted to animate, arranged their drawings, and used tablets to capture each tiny movement. It was perhaps the most challenging part for such a young group — but the moment their drawings started to come alive, their excitement took over.
The resulting mini-animations were imperfect, chaotic, hilarious… and absolutely wonderful.
This workshop reminded us of the power of co-creation when children are trusted with real creative tools. The tale they worked with is now part of a larger collective creative journey. Their contributions will join co-creation outcomes from other project partners and evolve into new illustrations and prototypes (always tested with children, who remain the true experts).
A simple motto from the project captures this beautifully: “Co-created by children, for children.”