Twine Game: Road to Heroism (Digital Citizenship Edition)
A zipped file to download, edit and play: Road to Heroism-Digital citizenship edition.html
A direct link to gameplay: https://r6k45r7p.play.borogove.io/
Co-Creators: Emily Olson, Leo Jiang and Yi Lu
Instructor: Prof. Jen Jenson
Individual Reflection
- “Learning from experienced designs and designers: How well (and seriously!) did your team follow, engage with and actually address the work of the educational designs/designers that you’ve been introduced to? Did you use any other sources for advice, guidelines or design principles in your project, and if so, what?”
Since Leo and Emily started sharing that they were interested in making an interactive game-based learning tool, we quickly set up a group channel on slack, added contacts on private messaging apps, and agreed to have video conferences via Zoom every weekend. These communication habits were maintained until the end of the project. As all of us only had a limited prior experience with Twine, these convenient synchronous and asynchronous communication channels effectively helped us discuss many critical issues throughout the development stage across different time zones, cultural backgrounds, and skill sets. We considered digital citizenship as outlined in the ISTE student standards, and our game focuses on managing digital identity and data, appropriate online interactions, and assessing the accuracy, perspective, credibility, and relevance of online info (ISTE, 2021).
- “Assets: What elements in the project—images, informational content, animations, sound effects, sound cues, backgrounds, code strings…etc.—did you make yourself/selves (i.e. not borrowed, stock images, etc.). What assets did you modify (and how did you modify them)? Who did what?”
Our game background is original to Leo based on our educational purposes. The plot of our game is original to Leo and Emily based on the ISTE student standards (ISTE, 2021). Most of our images are automatically generated through the text-to-image feature on the AI image generator NightCafe (2022) by Leo and Emily. Although they did not draw pictures themselves, images are automatically uploaded to their NightCafe homepages once created. The rest of the game images, including fake newspapers, fake SMSs, and fake Facebook pages, are either composites from Adobe (2022) or screenshots created by Leo and Emily.
- “Up-skilling: What NEW skills/abilities did your team gain or deepen through this project? Did you use an already familiar tool/tools set to build your project? Who learned what? It is understood that students’ technology experiences, skills and access will vary a lot; however it is also expected that everyone will build new skills or advance those they already have. That’s why you are asked to report specifically on what new tech skill/s your team needed, who took them on and why, and how they acquired them. Were there equal opportunities to learn? What did your team do about that?”
All of us three deepen our development skills with Twine and Night Café. As I worked on finding fantasy images with a consistent and harmonious style under creative common licenses to match our script, Emily found the Night Café could be a perfect solution as it has a text-to-image function automatically generated by AI. If it wasn’t for this project, I wouldn’t have realized that AI drawing technology is already available for free to the general public, and this will help me a lot in creating other tools related to my work.
I was mainly responsible for exchanging everyone’s scripts into Twine form in this project. Although I had learned to make simple Twine stories in another MET course, I still learned a lot of coding through this one. Because we planned to embed various educational affordances for this game, I had to learn the Macro programming language myself. Initially, I tried to use Twine’s manual book to learn, but I found it was not helping for someone with a non-programming background. Instead, watching YouTube walkthrough videos was more straightforward for a coding beginner. One regret I had with the project was that I could not establish a fun ranking system for the player to add a competitive element to the game.
- “Purpose: How well integrated were the purposes of your edtech tool with the form/s you used? (e.g., platform/s, images, progression, rules or guidelines, completion/conclusion, interactivity, interface, characters/avatars/personae, etc.)?”
The purposes of our edtech tool integrated with Twine very well. Since we target Intermediate students who are generally new to the online environment and thus vulnerable or not familiar with Online Etiquette. Twine provides an easy and safe channel for our target audience to experience mock online issues while promising engagement and autonomy through gamification and interactivity.
- “Audience: What, specifically, did you implement or do to engage marginalized persons with your edtech tool? (Think about girls/women, persons of colour, persons with different learning abilities, those who are indigenous, who identify as LGBTQ+, and those who speak languages other than English).”
We thought it was essential to give users the option to customize their names, and we also tried to make our characters gender and culturally-neutral in terms of names and pronouns to make them relevant in diverse contexts. In addition, we added alternate text for images in the activity. Ideally, we also wanted to make the tool keyboard operable and to add audio recordings so that users could press play and hear each section read aloud. Finally, it would also be ideal to have this story available in multiple languages using online translators such as DeepL and Google Translator.
- “Aha!: What was your tool’s most effective element/moment….and would you share what you’ve produced with your friends?”
Before we started this project, I thought our main problem would be technical capabilities since none of the team members come from IT or programming professions. But, surprisingly, we ended up spending most of the weekly meetings discussing and testing whether a particular storyline/function was educationally compelling for our target users. This project helps me realize that a new edtech tool should deploy appropriate technology and informational content to provide educational affordance for both learners and educators. Therefore, I believe the overall fantasy adventurous background is the most effective element in this game since it engages our target learners to keep reading the educational content. I have already shared this game with my colleagues throughout the development stage since I needed validation on both the script and the code. In the future, I will continue sharing this game with cooperating educational institutes and educators.
References
Adobe. (2022). [Online]. Adobe Express. https://www.adobe.com/express/
AI Art Generator. (2022). [Images]. NightCafe. Retrieved November 5, 2022, from https://creator.nightcafe.studio/
Assistant Secretary for Public Affairs (ASPA). (2022, June 30). What is bullying. StopBullying.gov. Retrieved December 6, 2022, from https://www.stopbullying.gov/bullying/what-is-bullying
Cyberbullying. Cyberbullying – National Bullying Prevention Center. (n.d.). Retrieved December 6, 2022, from https://www.pacer.org/bullying/info/cyberbullying/
Cyberbullying Research Center. (n.d.). Cyberbullying scenarios.
Cyberbullying Research Center. Retrieved December 6, 2022, from https://cyberbullying.org/cyberbullying-scenarios
Google. (n.d.) Interland: Be internet awesome. Retrieved November 5, 2022, from https://beinternetawesome.withgoogle.com/en_us/interland/
Hockey Canada cyberbullying and bullying prevention. (n.d.). Retrieved December 6, 2022, from https://www.hockeycanada.ca/en-ca/hockey-programs/safety/cyberbullying
ISTE. (2021). ISTE Standards for Students. ISTE.org. https://www.iste.org/standards/iste-standards-for-students
Mastrine, Julie. (2022). How to spot 16 types of media bias. Allsides. https://www.allsides.com/media-bias/how-to-spot-types-of-media-bias