Photo by Glenn Carstens-Peters on Unsplash
This week, I explored a new software called Twine. According to the official Twine website, it is “an open-source platform for telling interactive, nonlinear stories” (https://twinery.org/). It can be thought of as an online platform for creating your own adventure stories.
While playing around with Twine, I created my own story. I based my story on the objective of teaching students the importance of time management, prioritization, and organization. Please feel free to view my story below.
My Twine Story
Gamified Learning Activity Elements
Twine is very similar to an online game. A few gamified learning activity elements involved include the following:
- Narrative – The story begins with setting up the player as a first-year university student tasked to navigate their way through planning a group project.
- Immediate Feedback – With each choice that the player makes, they are given feedback.
- Player Control – The beauty of a twine story is that the outcome is completely dependent on the choices that the player makes.
Student Activity Using Twine
I think there are multiple ways to utilize Twine in learning. One student activity can be to have students learn about a certain concept through readings and youtube videos then create a Twine story from their learning. For example, they can learn how Chinese workers influenced the creation of the Canadian Pacific Railway. The next step is to have them create a Twine story that is inspired by what they learned.
Although Twine was relatively easy to learn, I did have some troubleshooting problems when trying to solve my errors. It does take a lot of patience and problem-solving on the creator’s part because each passage needs to make logical sense. Therefore, I think Twine is more appropriate for middle-school-aged students. Furthermore, I think that Twine can be used both in a creative sense but also in a technological sense. Twine uses HTML, Javascript, and CSS to create its stories. Through manipulation of each of the languages, creators can see how it affects the outcome. It teaches very basic coding and conditional logic.
Hi Sujean,
Twine is definitely similar to many online games out there, especially story games that are incorporating dialogue and different choices for the player to pick. It’s interesting that you picked a story on university students and how they have to make different choices while working on a group project. It’s definitely an idea that works really well because there can be so many existing conditional logics placed in the story. While working on my Twine story, I definitely spent a lot of time reconsidering the conditions that I’ve made, going back and forth between the dialogues. If you were to come up with a new story that would be created in Twine, what other story would you use and why?