This week I spend many hours learning how to make a digital game using Twine. I throughly enjoyed the triumphs and challenges of developing this game that features the digestive system.
When I began creating this game I was under the impression this would take an hour tops, but I was wrong! As I learned more about Twine I wanted to add more and more features to the game. I quickly found myself hours into development and needing to wrap up. I enjoyed learning something new that was completely out of my comfort zone. I felt a healthy learning experience that I often put my students into. I am looking forward to spending time developing this game further in the summer as I hope to give it to my students when we learn about the digestive system. I got the idea for the game from a student assignment. When we learn the structures, functions, chemical and mechanical digestion students create a project. One of the options for students is to write a creative story from the perspective of a piece of food being eaten. This gave me the idea to provide students with an experience of going through the digestive system and learning along the way.
I hope you enjoy, The Digestive System.
Great thanks for Adam Hammond for the tutorials!
Images are retrieved from Servier
Servier Medical Art by Servier is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution 3.0 Unported License
Hammond, A. (n.d). A total beginning’s guide to twine 2.1. Retrieved from http://www.adamhammond.com/twineguide/
Katlyn,
Your Twine was FANTASTIC!!!!! Amazing, informative and FABULOUS!!!
I went through the motions of Twine (not exactly happily), but your lesson on the digestive system put real-life context to how it can be used. Unknowingly, you just provided a HUGE puzzle piece to my learning this week about how Twine can be used in teaching/learning and that it doesn’t have to be a boring black screen with light writing. The non-fiction science model was perfect and images made it so informative. Thanks again for showing such a wonderful use for Twine.
Valerie
Valerie
Hey Valerie,
I’m glad you liked it! I was just in the thick of the digestive system and thought I would give it a try. My students did a test run for me and they enjoyed it 🙂
Katlyn, you are a magician! I spent hours upon hours searching different tutorials to discover how to embed videos and here you are with this absolutely fantastic and seamless Twine. Congratulations, I really enjoyed the variety of loops. This is not only a game but a great educational resource for biology students. I appreciated how you made it educational. It added a great layer.
Thanks Kristin! I’m looking forward to developing this game further in the summer to hopefully become an even better tool for students, so much to learn!
Hi Katlyn. I had a similar experience as you, and found the Hammond videos to be super helpful…but my final product is nowhere near as amazing as yours! I’m not a science teacher, but I want to pass this on to some of my colleagues that teach science. The visuals really make the content come alive. What a great example of how images and digital technology can enhance meaning!
Hi Helen, please do pass it along! I would love to develop it further and help make it better. Hopefully it can be a tool for others as well 🙂
Hi Katlyn,
Your Twine was fantastic! I only managed to get a story line with black background and the brightly coloured links. I got so tangled up in building a story and believed a comment somewhere down a rabbit hole that said Twine 2 couldn’t support images. Now, I want to go back and play a bit more with Twine. Thank you for the link to Hammond. By adding the images and sounds you present learning in a multimodal manner. Do you think students would be able to make their own presentations using Twine as a project to demonstrate learning?
Hi Rebecca,
Thank you, I’m glad you liked it.
I definitely thought about having students create their own game. I work with high school students and they could for sure figure out how Twine works. It would be cool to offer it is as option for a course review. In grade 11 biology we cover the body systems so each group could create a game for others to play to review material. If they used Twine it would be really easy for kids to all play at the same time.