(2015-10-30) Condor Twine In The Fourth Grade

KicksCondor: Twine in the Fourth Grade. At the beginning of the year, the principal came to me and said, “I’m going to have you help with the after-school computer club. It’s a club for fourth- and fifth-graders.”

“And code.org is going to give you all the stuff.”

A cup. A packet of seeds. A gumball. Dirt.

she goes on. “So the next thing is: zombies.”

“What is this for? Like: is this really teaching code?”

Fortunately—meaning this is where our fortune left the realm of mere dirt and a little bit of zombie walking—I had recently played a game called HIGH END CUSTOMIZABLE SAUNA EXPERIENCE

the game was a Twine game. A hypertext game. Made by Twine—some kind of neat way of building these games. I pulled it up on her Macbook. Fifteen minutes later, we were like: “This. We are doing this.”

So we covered Twine for the first three weeks of the club. The first day we just showed them how to link. This was actually plenty. I think this could have gone on for three weeks alone

So the kids universally loved the first week. (Kids love a lot of things, though.)

We talked about the set: command and the if: command

One kid wrote this dungeon where you could pick up a sword—and the sword is at 100%—so it’s like (set: $sword to 100). And then, as you fight through the dungeon, the sword wears down.

I was blown away by how much they could do with a simple variable and a conditional statement. I mean how. How are we spending time drawing shapes, lurching left, lurching right, when you can do all this great stuff with a variable and an if? I realize Papert did it this way—with shapes, with lurching—not with zombies but with turtles. Who am I to question Papert?

The beauty of Twine is that your variables persist—they last the whole game. Doing this with straight JavaScript and HTML would be such a hassle to teach

Initially I had planned to write some macros to help with inventory in Twine. I’m so glad I didn’t. By forcing the kids to use the basic constructs directly, they were able to grasp the rudiments and then apply those throughout their games.

Our third lesson covered adding images, music, colors and text styling. I’m not as happy with Twine’s absence of syntax here—you’re basically just doing HTML for most things. But I also felt it would be good for them to dip their toes in HTML.

There are a lot of movements out there to try to teach computer hacking, but they all really miss the mark in a way that Twine doesn’t. They don’t get railroaded into solving mazes. The kids come away with a real computer game.