Graig Peterson

Our app transcribes, evaluates, and animates kids’ original handwritten stories. Kids can enter and win "Clash of the Pencils," the free daily story contest for 8-12 year olds, purchase a movie of their story & share their masterpiece with family + friends. Mission: At Story Squad, we believe it is our responsibility to empower every kid’s creativity, prioritize an ethical digital experience, encourage human connection to the world outside of a screen, and give everyone an offramp back to our physical environment. Problem: Screen time is now its own pandemic. Elementary school children—whose cortical regions wired for attention and focus are vulnerable to blasts of dopamine—are binging on Fortnite, YouTube, & TikTok, all of which use push notifications, infinite scroll, and auto-play to keep them staring zombie-fied into a digital abyss. Our App's Features: We’ve designed an ecosystem that builds on the core benefits of handwriting and hand-drawing, as these offline activities create contact between different parts of the brain and open it up for learning. Our app unlocks the full value of handwriting via the first “creativity arcade” that digitizes and brings children’s original handwritten stories to life. Story Squad is the only edtech company aiming to maximize our users' “time-OFF-device,” which we define as time spent in imagination mode, armed with only a pencil or pen and paper. Over the past 3 years, our dev team has built technical expertise around three key domains: 1) handwriting-to-text OCR transcription for age-specific handwriting, 2) a “Story Analysis Engine” able to evaluate the characters, settings, and plots of kids’ original stories, 3) a Stable Diffusion animation pipeline able to render short-form movies of a user’s handwritten story through generative AI. Old school, meet new school...