Twine2 recap

Given that Twine is not a development platform tailored for kids, we finished up a 2 week intro cycle in the UVa Saturday Enrichment series using it with 4th and 5th graders with some incredible projects! And a class wiki with confirmed sample Twine 2 Harlowe code snippets that seem to work well for this age group. I'll work on finding a way to share these project samples so others in elementary education can use - maybe finally time for me to transition over to github! Take a look at a high level summary of what samples were created and scripting concepts they represent:

Piper:

Using the animated Pixar short of the same name, this project demonstrates "loops", variable development with boolean logic, and (if:) macros to represent the number of times it took for Piper to feel brave enough to go back to the water after her initial fright! The coding concepts control what text displays on a passage that keeps you on itself, keeping track of the number of times you click a link (hook), defining the number of times that hook needs to be clicked before you can progress to the next passage.

MadLibs and Clue

Madlibs, everyone's favorite goofy "make a story" and the classic "solve a mystery" Clue board game, these projects demonstrate the (prompt:) macro nested within a (set:) variable command that allows players to enter words based on pop up text box instructions, which then fill in the blanks to a story kids created and/or solve the Clue mystery.

We've covered real life HTML programming logic and kids truly embrace the challenge to make their own project versions using these 3 class samples. There is so much more to learn in Twine2 that a 5 week session just scratches the surface to cover, but so far, we are knocking it out of the park!