miffy495

TWINE in the Classroom - help me, Thumb developers!

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So for an upcoming class project, I'd like to mix it up with my students a little bit. I teach fifth grade here in Canada, and have a room full of 25 eleven year olds who are working on their writing skills and finding new and interesting ways to apply them. Our science unit on wetland life is wrapping up, and I've been toying with the idea of having them put together a project in which they pick an animal that we've studied and have a player go through the stages of its life cycle, hitting branch points along the way and making decisions that will impact that specific animal's outcome. I've done some experimenting with TWINE and it's totally within my students' capabilities, but there is one particular thing that's preventing me from getting started, so I thought I'd put it to you developer-types.

 

How in the hell can they save a work in progress?

 

I'll be more specific. I know that if they downloaded the TWINE editor, they could save things and continue working on them later no problem. Thing is, to get the TWINE editor approved and installed on all of the school's computers would likely take me beyond the end of the school year at the earliest. I also know that there's a web version that saves your works in progress to your browser. The problem with that is that from what I can tell it's saved specifically to the browser on that machine and that machine only. In a school setting where every time we need computers we check the available laptops out from the library, there's no guarantee that from one period to the next students will have the same OPERATING SYSTEM (our school is 50/50 Mac and Windows), let alone the same machine.

 

What I need is some way to use a web editor so I don't have to install anything and can avoid the ridiculous approval process, but also be able to download a work in progress so that the students can save their work to their network drives and then upload and continue working on it the next class. Is there an editor out there that lets me do this? I have everything else about the project worked out and would really love to do it, but this is a showstopping roadblock for me. Any help or pointers would be greatly appreciated.

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I only tested this switching from Firefox to Chrome on my machine, but it seems that so long as you don't enable html obfuscation (is that even an option in Twine 2?), you should be able to publish the unfinished story to an html file and later use "import from file" on the landing page of the editor to reverse that into an editable project.

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Ok, I created a quick test file on my home computer and uploaded the published html file to a shared drive folder (my school has google accounts for all students, so if we need cloud storage they already know to just upload stuff). When I get in to work tomorrow I'll download it to my work computer and see if I can keep it going. Thanks for the help!

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Works like a charm! The kids are super excited and we put together a really quick example on the smart board today so that they could get a feel for it. We wrote the paragraphs together and I had kids come up to my laptop plugged into the board to write the links between pages themselves. They loved it and are totally ready to get into writing their own. If you're interested in seeing what ten year olds will do with TWINE, I hastily put together the site gradeschoolif.weebly.com (why yes, I am an artistically challenged grade school teacher and not a web designer, why do you ask?) for us to put our work up on as we finish. Right now, it's just the demo that we were building in class today, but they're stoked as hell to get writing. Cool stuff!

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I definitely will. Some of them were already working on it last night at home, so they came in to school today wanting to show me what they'd started. Like 4 of them left the classroom yesterday with "twinery.org" written on their palms in sharpie. When I told them that I'd linked to it already on the school's teacher blog, the response was all along the lines of "FINDING THAT LINK WILL TAKE AWAY FROM TIME THAT I COULD USE TO BE CREATING!", so I have high hopes for this project.

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miffy, it always sounds like your doing cool things with your students. I'm sure I would have relished the opportunity to make a game at 11 years old.

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So the kids are nowhere near done, but I have one boy who has used his week to get a pretty decent rough copy done. It is still riddled with errors, some spelling and some factual, but those curious to see what a 10 year old does with a week of TWINE, I put up his work in progress at gradeschoolif.weebly.com/nikolai.html.

 

EDIT: Sorry, made that first post from my phone and couldn't work out the linking from the mobile version. Now you can actually click on a thing!

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UPDATE:

 

Students are nearly done with their first project games. I now have five examples up on the site, a mix of finished (or an 11 year old has said "I'm done!" without actually hitting all the assignment requirements but can't be convinced otherwise) and works-in-progress. Some have been getting more into the writing part than others. It's turning out to be a mix of genuine grade school interactive fiction and some animal trivia games from kids who weren't feeling as creative. Still, they loved the project and I'm now introducing TWINE around the school to other teachers who've had these kids run up to them saying "TRY MY VIDEO GAME!" and want to know what the hell this is. Very worthwhile project, and I'll be using TWINE as a way to show ideas with future classes for damn sure. This was a smash hit with the kids, got me better writing samples than any of the actual writing assignments they've had in language arts, and allowed me to explore concepts with them like second-person writing, which they'll be able to take with them to a bunch of future classes. IF as a learning tool is rad as hell.

 

Results from the current project will be going up here as I get assignments in from the kids. There are five right now, and the rest should be trickling in over the course of the week. Thanks for the advice on this one, Thumbs!

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I enjoyed Nikolai's sense of humour. There should be more writers willing to bully the reader into making the right decision. It reminds me of To Be or Not To Be, by Ryan North, in that respect. Interactive shakespeare.

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Hahaha. That's 10 year olds. I'll pass on the feedback that I get. The kids were pretty amazed when I told them I'd put a link to their work on a forum that honest-to-god GAME DEVELOPERS look at.

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"You eat the fish but also become a snake burger you lose"

 

Ahaha this is the best.

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This is fantastic.

 

At this point i know you at least died once which means you have now been given one mor chance but if you loose again you are not paying atention and this is not the game for you.

why are you not paying atention

 

(I am not a good water snake)

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I played red wing blackbird by Vanessa. I stayed true to myself and got a mate. That was super charming.

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Two more up today. Read out some of the feedback to the kids. They're super happy about it and proud of themselves. Thanks, thumbs!

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