As I mentioned last week, I'm teaching a class called Learning Through Gaming. In the survey I gave the class the first day, many students indicated they wanted to make games. To give them a taste of creating a game, I had them create a Choose Your Own Adventure story using Google Slides.
Here's a document based very closely on the directions we gave our students.
The document contains all directions and a link to this very basic sample story I made. I also included a link to Eric Curts' excellent example. (If you're not familiar with Eric's amazing site, Ctrl Alt Achieve, be sure to check it out. Like so many of his posts, he has the definitive guide on Choose Your Own Adventure stories for class.)
A few other things to note about this assignment:
- I put a video tutorial in the later stages of the document that shows how to create the links.
- Students will probably want to get started on the links right away. As you'll see, I emphasize planning first.
- As Eric says on his blog, his story was written and illustrated by middle school students. Like the Choose Your Own Adventure books many of us loved as children, the endings sometimes involve your death. Keep this in mind if assigning this to younger students.
- The example stories I link to are published to the web. That means they open in full screen. I didn't include directions for that for the students. In their case, they start the story by clicking the Present button in Google Slides.
- Like many of our activities at the middle school level, I will be posting the students' stories on our school website. The school will vote on their favorites and the winning authors will get a prize.
