Moving at the Speed of Creativity by Wesley Fryer

First Choose Your Own Adventure Story with Twine: The Spark

Update: philome.la (@philomela_twine) is a website providing free hosting of Twine stories powered by TiddlyWiki. For official Twine news follow @twinethreads.

Twine is a free, open source software program and browser-based platform (in alpha) for creating “choose your own adventure” style stories. I loved these books when I was in elementary school. You can read these books several times and choose different options, so you end up with a different story and plot sequence each time. Another term for this type of writing is “interactive fiction.”

choose your own adventure 076: the mona by cdrummbks, on Flickr
Creative Commons Attribution 2.0 Generic License  by  cdrummbks 

This evening I spent about an hour creating my first, short Twine story. It’s not too complicated or amazing, but it’s fun and I’m glad to learn some of the basics of using Twine. I opted to use the browser-based version. You can save your file by downloading it locally. There’s no way to create a web account on the site, you can’t save your files to the Twinery.org site. I love its simplicity. Your entire Twine story is saved as a single HTML file. I used the documentation wiki to figure out how to add Creative Commons licensed images on each of my pages, and I included attribution links back to the original Flickr pages at the bottom of each one. I uploaded my “final” story to our family learning blog. Check it out:

The Spark

The Twine website (and I assume software program too) generates a helpful schematic or mind-map of the story passages you’ve created and referenced. Like early HTML, the codes you utilize to link passages and add images are very simple. The only bug I ran into was I couldn’t delete all the external link files and extra passages which I decided later I didn’t need or want to keep. My entire short story is comprised of 8 different passages, which each have their own CC images included on them.

Twinery Choose Your Own Adventure by Wesley Fryer, on Flickr
Creative Commons Attribution 2.0 Generic License  by  Wesley Fryer 

Give Twine a try, it’s powerful, simple, and free/open source!

Many thanks to Alex Couros who shared Twine via Twitter on March 6th.

Alex Couros recommends Twine by Wesley Fryer, on Flickr
Creative Commons Attribution 2.0 Generic License  by  Wesley Fryer 

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One response to “First Choose Your Own Adventure Story with Twine: The Spark”

  1. […] and STEM.  Many of his posts describe digital tools teachers can use in the classroom such as Twine, a choose-your-own adventure story tool.  He also highlights tools for teaching skills like visual […]