Student Interactive Fiction: Exploring Brankav

BrookeAudrey Exploring Brankav

I’m slowing sharing out a collection of student-created Interactive Fiction pieces, which I am compiling into a website resource, too. Here, a team of two students really got into the narrative choices as they worked with the software, Twine, to map out and create their story: Exploring Brankav (I believe the name is a play on elements of their names).

Read Exploring Brankav by Brooke and Audrey.

You can also read the story I posted the other day — The Temple of Selaina by Sarah.

Peace (in the branches),
Kevin

 

Student Interactive Fiction: The Temple of Selaina

SarahC Temple Story
I am pulling together a collection of student stories that were created as part of our Interactive Fiction unit, in which my sixth grade students first read and reflected on the use of “choose your own ending” style of stories (we were lucky enough to have some funds to purchase some class sets of the books) and then worked with the software, Twine, to write and build their own stories. I am in the process of building a website in our new Google Apps for Education space to publish and share a collection of student stories, and I am now considering ways to adapt what we did with Twine for when I do Interactive Fiction with my next two classes in a few weeks. (I might use Inklewriter, the online writing space.)

First up, though, is a wonderful story by Sarah called The Temple of Selaina. Sarah is one my stronger readers, and she really seemed to “get it” when it came to reading and writing these stories with many branches. In fact, she followed every single ending in the books that she read, and came in each day, talking about what had happened to “her” in the stories (usually, something bad, given the way those books are written.)

The image above is a screenshot of the main interface of Twine, showing where stories branch off and how they become a tree of ideas. I really love that aspect of Twine — it gives a very visual map to the stories as students are writing.

Read The Temple of Selaina by Sarah C.

Peace (in the sharing),
Kevin

Choose Your Own Adventure: Student Story Maps

As I have written, I have two classes of students finishing up the writing of an Interactive Fiction project right now, using the software Twine to build and publish stories with multiple arcs. Before they started writing, I had them conceptualize their story ideas in the form of a story map. Here are two of them (we modeled this strategy earlier by having them map out one of the Choose Your Own Adventure novels they were reading.)

Student Story Map2

Student Story Map3

Peace (in the branches)
Kevin

Time – A Student Interactive Fiction Story

Karen Story

My sixth grade students are working to finish up an experimental writing unit around Interactive Fiction, using Twine to create Choose Your Own Ending stories. It’s been interesting to watch because the critical thinking skills necessary for planning and writing these stories is fairly complex. They are also learning a new software (Twine) and yesterday, I taught them a bit about using html code to add an image to their stories, if they want to do that.

I am hoping that most (all?) will be done by the end of today. We’ll see. I am hosting the files in my Google Docs, using the shortcut that I had found that allows you to host and share html (webpages) from within folders on Google Drive.

Here is one story that a student finished up yesterday. She seems to have “gotten” the concept of branching story paths.

Read Time by Karen J.

Peace (in the choices),
Kevin

 

The Choose-Your-Own-Adventure Assignment: Mystery of the Ruins

I have two classes of students working hard on their own version of Choose Your Adventure format stories using the software, Twine, and they are really into it. Here is the assignment I gave them — I am trying to provide some basics for them even as I leave enough space for creativity. Since this is a pilot project (I’ve never done this particularly project with this particularly software, although I did something similar a few years ago), I am keeping an eye on how things progress and what changes I will need to make to the assignment when I do it again (later this year, with two other classes.)

Peace (in the sharing),
Kevin

Choose Own Adventure Books: Likes and Dislikes

As some of you know, I am in the midst of trying something new. Two of my classes of students have spent a week reading Choose Your Own Adventure novels, and now will begin writing their own. I was amazed at how many books they were reading, and I did an informal survey to gather some numbers.

CYO Adventure Reading Survey

I also asked them about what they were liking and disliking about the books.

Likes:

  • The reader makes decisions about the story
  • There are many different ways that the stories can end
  • It’s entertainment reading
  • You can always backtrack into the story and start over at another point
  • The reader is a partner with the writer
  • The reader is a character in the story

Dislikes:

  • Too many story branches end in death
  • It’s easy to lose your place, particularly if you want to go back
  • The jumping around the book can be confusing
  • The novels are too short
  • Lots of exaggeration, unrealistic adventure
  • Not all the endings were equally creative
  • Not enough choice (!)

I’ll admit — that last one threw me, but I was the recorder of the discussion here.

Peace (in the endings),
Kevin

Interactive Fiction Experiment: A Rvl Story Cube

Interactive Fiction storystarts
I saw someone in my RSS feed share a link for this beta site — Rvl — that allows you to create virtual-cube-shaped presentations, and I wondered if it might work for interactive fiction. You have to envision the project as a cube that has sides up, down and to the right when creating (although you can go left to view). It does work, somewhat, but the inability to see a master plan, or concept map, of the various slides in orbit around the virtual cube made the writing of a story quite tricky. I had to make sure the narrative folded back in on itself a number of times (and there may still be some potholes in the story as a result. Sorry.)

You can access the story directly here, too. Use your arrow keys on the keyboard to toggle around, or you can mouse-click it, too. Let me know what you think …

Peace (cubed),
Kevin