Writing Interactive Stories in the Classroom
The last five years have seen interactive storywriting technology mature to the point where it has become widely popular and is starting to be recognized as a new communications medium. The two most common examples of interactive stories are computer games and educational training simulations. Non-linear interactive stories involve the reader as an active participant in the story where the player (reader) has a direct influence on the plot of the story. Compared to traditional linear pen-and-paper (or word processor-created) stories, interactive stories come with a new set of challenges, but also provide an interesting set of opportunities. Currently, students are not exposed to the challenges or opportunities of writing interactive stories for two reasons. First, interactive storywriting technology is too complex to be used in the classroom. Second, critical parts of this new technology require the writer to construct sophisticated computer programs to tell the story. In this paper, we describe how we have solved these two problems by developing a student-friendly environment (ScriptEase) that enables non-programmers to write interactive stories using a simple set of tools. Specifically we describe how High School students used our tools to create Computer Role Playing Game (CRPG) stories that can be played (read) as adventures in the popular Neverwinter Nights computer game.
Citation
D. Szafron,
M. Carbonaro,
M. Cutimisu,
S. Gillis,
M. McNaughton,
C. Onuczko,
T. Roy,
J. Schaeffer.
"Writing Interactive Stories in the Classroom". Interactive Multimedia Electronic Journal of Computer-Enhanced Learning(IMEJ), 7(1), June 2005.
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BibTeX
@article{Szafron+al:IMEJ05,
author = {Duane Szafron and Mike Carbonaro and Maria Cutimisu and Stephanie
Gillis and Matthew McNaughton and Curtis Onuczko and Thomas Roy and
Jonathan Schaeffer},
title = {Writing Interactive Stories in the Classroom},
Volume = "7",
Number = "1",
journal = {Interactive Multimedia Electronic Journal of Computer-Enhanced
Learning(IMEJ)},
year = 2005,
}Last Updated: June 04, 2007
Submitted by Staurt H. Johnson 
