At the Spring Digital Pedagogy Showcase, the DWRL’s Twine Game Research Group shared resources and ideas for incorporating Twine—a textual, nonlinear, game-making program—into a basic writing curriculum.
The Twine Research Group’s “Game Jam” assignment is a single-day, in-class assignment based on the classical rhetorical methods of the progymnasmata—a series of preliminary rhetorical exercises intended to prepare students to deliver a full classical oration. In the Game Jam lesson plan, students compose short Twine games using the progymnasmata as an inventive framework. This lesson plan can be fun and effective on its own as a device for teaching the progymnasmata, but it can also provide an opportunity for students to brainstorm and build the digital literacies necessary to complete a longer Twine project.
You can read through the Twine Group’s lesson plan below, and you can also download your own copy, complete with working links.
DWRL_LessonPlan_Twine_GameJam
In addition to this lesson plan, the Twine Research Group has also created a library of resources to help instructors implement Twine games in the writing classroom. These resources are incorporated into the Game Jame assignment, but they could also be used alone or in support of another Twine-based lesson plan.
J Brentlinger’s “The Meta Game” is a short, easy-to-use Twine game that instructs students in the basic elements of Twine (links and images). After playing through “The Meta Game,” students and instructors will have the basic skills necessary to construct a simple Twine game.
For students and instructors who wish to compose more complicated games, Lily Zhu’s “Paper-Writing With Twine” presentation covers some intermediate skills necessary to compose hooks, variables, “if” conditionals, and more. This workshop will be particularly valuable for students composing longer, more robust Twine assignments.
If you have questions, or you would like assistance implementing Twine (and other digital tools) in your classroom, please visit our Mentoring page. There, you can request an appointment with a DWRL staff member who will help you through the planning and implementation of this digital assignment.
