Ever since seeing a Sunday Morning piece about the short story vending machines in France, I've been obsessed with the idea. Of course, those machines are amazing and advanced and certainly far too expensive to get a hold of, even as they move from being a cool experiment in France to being something awesome for places around the world. So - I made a hacked version for about $150, and it has become the centerpiece for several programs in our library.
This machine can be used to showcase writings of young adults in your library, excerpts from books and where to find those books, or just for fun. Ours has been in place since November and had about 300 uses since then (with about three weeks of it being out of order in the middle) - about the same number of times the new gaming computers we had built and put into the Teen Room have been used.
I have setup a Figment educational account to create a private group on the website to encourage use of the site for flash fiction prompts and to provide a safe places for writing and critique and will be having programs based around this site and the machine.
Type: Self-directed
Age: High school
Optimal size: 20+
Estimated cost: $100+
Planning time: 2-5 hours
Frequency: Daily
Learning outcomes
+Storytelling - This is obviously the main goal for any members who want to contribute to the machine.
+Desire to Read - Packing a story into a short form makes them more accessible for reluctant readers, and this is especially helpful when doing excerpts from stories - members may find a short piece they love and be inspired to read the whole book.
+Critique - Members will be able to share flash fiction and learn the best ways to critique stories for one another.
+Medium & Message - Flash fiction is a challenge. 500 words is a severe limitation for a story, and learning how to get the most out of each word is necessary - and one of the easiest ways to teach such skills.
+Online Collaboration - The educator will use cloud-based tools (Figment) to provide a platform for collaborating and workshopping.
Instructions
1. Buy a capsule machine. There are a number of websites out there for this sort of thing, and a number of them used on eBay or other such auction websites. Ours is a 2" Capsule dispenser, and I paid extra to not require quarters to operator. We are considering purchasing another that does require quarters to keep in the front of the library as a fundraiser.
2. Purchase the capsules to put inside. I bought 100 initially, and in the four months it has been available, 51 capsules have gone home with kids or broken. I have a basket that asks for teens to put the capsules back inside, and often the stories are missing (and not in the trashcan, score!). I thought the 100 would last a bit longer, but I will be purchasing more soon.
3. Have access to a receipt printer and receipt tape. This is what the stories get printed on. The word document needs to be set up just right to print properly on the receipt tape. I print to a Star TSP700II, which uses an 80mm width tape. I am uploading a sample story for formatting purposes.
4. Get stories! I luckily had a number I had written for Figment that were 500 words or less. This is the limit I put on teens who want to submit stories. For the initial set of stories, I used these and public domain short stories (a lot of Aesop's Fables!) or short stories online where the author had given permission to share, with information on where to access the story online. Save each one to its own document for easy of printing/the receipt printer cutting each for you.
5. Print and fold! This takes some trial and error. The last load I gave to my Youth Advisory Board, and they all folded them differently for the capsules! One even made origami cranes out of each. See what works best for you.
6. Load them in! Print signage! All that jazz. See how your community likes them. We were pleasantly surprised by how often the machine gets used, and it's unfortunate whenever I'm gone for a couple of days because that's inevitably when the machine runs out of stories!
7. Find ways to get teens to contribute stories. I am running small contests and have started a Figment private community in order to encourage more writing. I will also run flash fiction writing contests and being glad my creative writing BA is finally being put to use.
Evaluation
+Stats - This is what my bosses like to see the most for the evaluation, and it's been running really well so far.
+Engagement with Teens - Watching teens run to the front to tell their friends about the machine, seeing them take the capsules outside to show their parents, receiving e-mails with teens excited to add their stories to the machine - all of these are qualitative results that are amazingly encouraging.
Other resources
For my full blog post on this project, including gifs and more detailed instructions, see this link.