There’s a wonderful idea over at Ed Stuck in the Cloud: why not use the Inform platform to create text based adventures a la Zork to enthuse students?
“While the idea of asking students to create video games could be daunting to a teacher with core curriculum concerns, it becomes quickly evident with use that Inform is crazy easy to use.
By the end of the one hour workshop at GLS7, I had built a text-based framework of an Elizabethan theatre, replete with a mysterious Bard, a stage to explore, and several theatrical props. The potential for using Inform in a classroom is endless, whether you approach it as a vehicle to create games, simulations, or narratives. The nature of the programming language is such that it reinforces for students the importance of grammar, spelling and punctuation (for example, the system will tell you if you’re missing an action verb while giving examples of how to fix it). Just look at a line of my “code.”
The Bard is a man in the Globe stage. The description of the Bard is “A pale balding man dressed in black with a modest ruff. A pained expression plays across his visage as he angrily aims his rolled quarto stage left.”
The Inform Engine Josh is talking about looks pretty straightforward. This screencast, by Aaron Reed takes you through how to get up and running.
Inform 7 Introductory Screencast from Aaron Reed on Vimeo.
It’ll take some thought how best to use it, but I feel pretty confident it would get the children hooked. One idea off the bat would be to do something cross-curricular. So if they are studying the Tudors in History perhaps we could have project where each child has to write a short piece of code on one of several randomly generated Tudor characters and places. So one child gets Henry VIII and The Tower of London, one child gets Anne Boleyn and Hampton Court, one gets Francis Drake and Plymouth Hoe. If they emailed them to me I could put them in, the software has the ability to publish online, and then we could spend a lesson exploring what they had come up with.
Still, it’s got me all enthused. Thanks Josh!