Too often in our Professional Development sessions I overhear teachers saying, ‘when would I ever use this?’ or in class hearing kids groan, ‘this is boring’.  This is what I initially felt during the Twine Task in week five; that this is not something that I could see myself using in real life. Not that I don’t understand the theory behind digital games and play-based learning, or hypertext and the elements of choice and fluidity that it brings to learning.  I just couldn’t quite grasp how I could use this information in this specific platform and still be appealing to a group of intermediate students.  I tend to agree with cynics that say young kids get ‘bored’ more easily and seem to require more stimulation to keep engaged.  Nomophobia, screen addiction, instant gratification/content provide conditions where many adults fear children are losing the ability or initiative to unplug. Think TikTok or Instagram….swipe, swipe, swipe; receiving information in short bits at a relatively fast-pace through self-controlled multimedia and multimodality. So how would a lesson I create on Twine to capture and keep the interest of my students knowing full-well that a text only story wouldn’t cut it, no matter how funny or personalized it was?  Even after creating my own Twine and viewing a few samples, I was frustrated that I still couldn’t visualize this working for my students (as a prebuilt lesson from me or building their own).

Enter Katlyn’s post.  FANTASTIC! Just what I needed to make the connection between Twine, my teaching job and curriculum, as well as scaffold me toward understanding the potential for Twine.  Katlyn created a fact-based journey through the digestive system that would fit perfectly into the BC grade 5 Science curriculum.  It has kid-friendly choices with ‘cool’ content to reel the student’s into the Twine.  There was stimulating sound effects to mimic a fun mystery or puzzle-solving adventure while we journeyed through the stomach, intestines and beyond.  Images were very clear and informative, and the layout was crisp and inviting.  I liked that it had immediate feedback for incorrect responses and colour-highlighted key vocabulary words which made the pathway easy to follow.  Thinking of my students, having the ability to get an answer wrong, but keep going through a re-route instead of a ‘X’ would be important to their resilience. Katlyn’s hypermedia confirmed the idea presented by Dobson and Willinsky (2009) that improved comprehension and motivation could result from hypermedia because it mimics the mind.  Katlyn’s Twine did that for me.  I could understand the digestive system better after playing the game, I was motivated to play, and it mimicked my mind as it provided choices, linked ideas and recalled knowledge stored in the depth of my memory.

Katlyn’s post helped me make connections of Twine, hypermedia, and game-play to my own context. Her information and example provided the boost I needed to get over my reluctance and uncertainty that lessons with Twine would flop.