Student Interactive Fiction: The Temple of Selaina

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