Coding may not sound like something you’d find in an English Language Arts classroom, but it fits right into the Digital Story Game Project developed by Mike Sell, an English professor, and Rachel Schiera, a master’s and doctoral graduate.
The project engages students in storytelling, decision making, and coding while assisting the teacher with curriculum planning and promoting collaboration in the classroom.
It’s centered around Twine, an open-source software that gives students the chance to create interactive, digital stories with multiple pathways, like Choose Your Own Adventure books.
“There comes a moment when you click on this and you click on that, and the students see this thing that magically unfolds on the screen in front of them. It happens every time. It’s a magic moment. They go “ooh,” and they immediately lean forward, and they start typing.”
Sell and Schiera wanted to make the learning experience fun and to promote unusual forms of writing. From the reactions Sell has seen in the classroom, it’s working.
“There comes a moment when you click on this and you click on that, and the students see this thing that magically unfolds on the screen in front of them,” he said. “It happens every time. It’s a magic moment. They go ‘ooh,’ and they immediately lean forward, and they start typing.”
Teachers can adapt the concepts to fit their needs and the age of their students. Sell works with educators to find ways to match curriculum objectives with features of the Digital Story Game Project.
He said, “What I love is when we sit down with a teacher and we say, ‘Hey, we’ve got this amazing tool that focuses on decision making as a learning process and as a storytelling focus. Where in your curriculum do you see decision making playing the most important role?’”
The first to pilot the project was a middle-school gifted teacher, Susan White, who continues to be a collaborator and who has shared her insights from working with the story games.
As a teacher for 30 years, Sell enjoys watching students gain confidence in their writing ability through the Digital Story Game Project.
“Part of being a teacher of writing is that students share their writing with me, and they share it with each other,” he said. “They really don’t like to do that. But students who are creating interactive digital story games—they want to share.”