As a medium, fan fiction gives students the liberty to alter existing worlds or create new ones where they can build upon stories or topics that excite them.

The genre also allows students who are still learning about the elements of a good story to “jump right into a preexisting world, and they can really just attend to things about plot and characterization and create new characters without having to do all those other world-building aspects,” says Rebecca Black, a former high school teacher and now professor of informatics at the University of California, Irvine, who has studied the impact of fan fiction on adolescents and English learners.

Read the full story at Edutopia.