I know I’m late to the party on this, but Google recently released Story Builder, a simple web app that lets you create a simulation of 2–10 characters collaborating in a Google Document. Weirdly specific, right? When I first looked at this, I liked it, but couldn’t see a lot of useful applications. Then I found some posts by teachers who are using to it encourage their students to create mini-stories about how, say, the Founding Fathers might have argued over and revised a given line in the Constitution. And that’s awesome—in one assignment, those kids are learning both to deconstruct critical texts and write innovatively.

In terms of corporate learning, I’m still not sure I’d want to use the Story Builder for much: each video is limited to 10 character actions; you can’t edit an earlier action without erasing everything that came after; and the app is cloud-based, so you couldn’t host anything remotely proprietary on it. But for short messages, I like the style—it’s a fun way to take a bad example and show the process of turning it into the ideal.

Here’s a conflict-of-interest demo I threw together.