Creating Their Own Adventures

"I'm still a kid inside, and adventure is adventure wherever you find it."

-Jim Dale

A personal favorite activity this year has been using Choose Your Own Adventure stories that go beyond the point and click variety. I first tried a method with Google Slides during my medical leave (detailed here) and then stepped it up to the next level by using Google Forms (explained here in my guest post on the EdTechTeam blog).

Getting started on the paper template

It's fun to make them and read their arguments, but ultimately students are still consuming the material more so than creating. I wanted to take it further - my students would build their own Choose Your Own Adventure story in Google Forms.

My students have never created any Google Forms and their exposure is limited to using the ones I've created for them. For this reason, I decided they would first map out their storylines on paper and then transfer it to the Google Form.

I provided them a template and gave minimal directions to them. Some students jumped right to it, while others struggled. I found many students couldn't grasp the divergent thinking associated with managing multiple storylines. Here are a few tips I found helpful in providing aid to these students:

Fixing the template. Yes, my desk is a disaster. 

• Be intentional with your word choice. Sometimes I would say, "Finish this section with two choices." Some took this as "You can have pizza or chicken and the pizza can be cheese or pepperoni." Technically, this is two choices. I shifted to saying, "Give a choice with two options."
• Physically pointing on the template was a giant help to some students. I would point at one column and say, "This can go here or here. What choices would make sense in your story?"
• A few students found it helpful to list all of their choices options first, and then go back to fill in the details in the story. If they chose this, I encouraged them to put the options on the top of the grid for that template. 
• Sometimes, students benefited from just starting over entirely. Keep plenty of extra copies on hand. 
• Some students needed more guidance than others, and that's totally ok. While some grasped the branching immediately, others didn't. A few students wanted to just write a linear story, while others were making choices and neglecting other paths. I worked with them to understand it for the first few steps and gradually pulled back the scaffolds.
• On my side of things, the template definitely needed work. The cool thing was I was able to modify the template as the students went along, incorporating their feedback immediately. For example, originally the template just had a bunch of boxes with designated sections it would correspond to on the Form. I realized more directions were needed. One of my students helped me make these changes, including typing more clear directions (such as, "Start with option 1 from section above" and "End with two options") and simple formatting. The final completed template can be accessed at this Force Copy link.

Transferring from paper to Form

Once students were done with their paper template, they moved onto the Google Form (accessible here at this Force Copy link). On the paper copy, each section had a marker on the top corner that said "S1, S2..." These corresponded to the sections on a Google Form. I had already linked the sections in the "Go to Page Based on Response" settings, so students didn't need to worry about that. (In the future, if students were more comfortable with Forms, I might teach them how to do this themselves.) Again, some tips for success:

• First things first - it wasn't smooth sailing to start. Some students had a hard time figuring out what to put in what section of the Form. There were two camps, both of which ended up being successful:
• "The Scrollers" who would put in a full storyline (visiting Section 1, then 4, then 18, etc) and then go back up to the top to do the next path
• "The Straight Liners" who matched section numbers on the template directly to the sections on the Form
• Students will delete sections, and the proper branching along with it. Generally speaking, they could figure out where to relink it by consulting the template, but they needed to learn how to do that first. Overall, they picked up on Forms very quickly, which is awesome because some adults struggle with it. 
• They loved adding pictures and it led to a good conversation about copyright and using the images Google provides right in the search tool in Forms. 
• Again, this template needed work on my part. Originally, the section titles said "Choice 1, Choice 2, End of Path 1, etc" since I just modified the template I used. I realized that I needed to match it to what their template said, so I replaced them with S1, S2, etc. This didn't help students who had already made a copy of the Form template, but helped other students after I made this change. 
• One student made the suggestion to replace the S1 with "You chose..." as a way to make the story more cohesive. I really thought this was a good idea and many of the students went back to edit to reflect this idea. 

When they were all done, I had them submit their hyperlink, their name, and title of the story on a Google Form. I used the =HYPERLINK and =IMPORTRANGE formulas in Sheets to make a master list of all completed games for students to try each other's stories (viewable here).

Testing and making edits

This was the really cool part. I saw students paired up doing each other's Forms and giving feedback as they traveled through the story paths. The "player" caught mistakes like incorrect title formatting, misspellings, unclear paths, improperly linked choices, or other things and the "builder" would open their copy to edit for changes. It essentially removed me from the feedback loop, and I am 100% ok with that. Peer feedback is crucial and critical to growing as a creator. 

How long did this all take? When all is said and done, students had a maximum of two and a half mornings to work on it, or roughly four to five hours. We're at the end of our school year and had some end-of-year assessments and projects to finish. Rather than defaulting to the "Free Read" when they were done, this was the "Fast Finisher" work. It's a really good idea for this because once a few students are done, they have more to explore on by completing other's adventures. In my class of 29, if everyone created a Form with 16 possible outcomes, there would be a total of 464 different variations before students completed all of them.

This was just the first experience and I know further iteration is needed. Next year, I plan to delve into this more and earlier in the year. I think it can be a really incredible for experience for the students and get them thinking in different ways. I definitely saw students being pushed and strive to improve their craft, which is awesome when you consider we were at the end of the school year.

How can you implement this in your classroom? What modifications would you make?

Choose Your Own Adventure: Active Engagement Edition

"Life is either a great adventure or nothing."

-Helen Keller

One of my favorite genres to read as a student was a Choose Your Own Adventure book. In these books, you read a page and follow the directions at the bottom. Maybe you would have to choose to eject from a falling aircraft or chance a crash landing or perhaps you could shoot a laser beam at the alien or try to run away from it. Either way, I usually ended up dead, kind of like my experiences playing Oregon Trail. Luckily, you could always start over.

As I became a teacher, I found out you could do similar tasks with Google Forms and Slides, either through "Go to Page Based on Response" or linking to different slides, respectively. However, my issue with that was the same I had with the books: It's a passive experience. While the reader needed to make a choice, there was little active engagement beyond that.

Bringing it into 2017

While I was out being treated for cancer with chemotherapy, I wrote to my students every day. After a few weeks of this, both the students and I needed a change from back and forth conversation. I thought back to my obsession with Choose Your Own Adventures as a fourth grader and wanted to mimic this, but with more of an active role.

I realized I could use Slides, but give them the story piece-by-piece each day. This way, they were making a choice and also engaging with the story beyond a mouse click. Before they would get the next part of their story, they would need to make a choice AND defend it. This helped build argumentative skills and persuasive writing elements. The "Master Deck" of The Winter Expedition can be found here.

The students didn't disappoint. They crafted strong arguments for why they chose to pick up the ice pick instead of the flashlight (my favorite being, "With an ice pick, I can break things and breaking things is kind of my thing") or why they thought going towards a mysterious odor was better than a growling ("I could just cover up my nose to block the smell, but the growling might be a bear." Plot twist - the odor was a monster. Sorry, kid.)

While I was struggling to get 2-3 sentences in response to "How is your day?" I would get two paragraphs solidifying their choices. It definitely helped improved their writing skills, especially their skills of persuasion.

The final slide asked them for their feedback on the experience. Of my 28 students, about 25 of them preferred this activity to their normal writing to me, with many of them saying they enjoyed being put into the story and having to make a choice. Some even mentioned how they enjoyed having to defend their pathway.

I realize as a classroom teacher, it might seem overwhelming to have to paste in new parts of a story each day, but it could easily be done during part of a planning period, during lunch, or in the evening. In total, once it was set up, it only took about half an hour to read each response and paste in the next section. I'll trade half an hour a day for more active engagement in writing.

So how do you do this with your class?

I've developed this Doc for planning it all and this Slides template for designing each slide. (Clicking on those links will give you a force copy of each document.) Both templates have directions on what to do. I recommend starting with the Doc and then transferring to the Slides; that's how I laid it all out.

Once you are done with the "Master Slides," make a copy and delete all but the starting few slides. That's what your students will start with and you'll add to it from there. Attach this new Slidedeck onto Google Classroom as "Make a Copy for Each Student" so they each get their own deck to work on.

I also made this screen cast to explain it all, since I wasn't sure if the written directions were enough.

One student already started on making his own
versions on Google Docs

Try it out, tweak it, do whatever you see fit. The students will enjoy it and I will be challenging mine to develop their own CYOA stories to send to partners. If you have questions, feel free to reach out via Twitter, email, or the comments below.

AUTHOR'S NOTE: Check out a second (and easier to manage) iteration of this project, using Google Forms, here. 

Now it's your turn to make a choice:

Do you share this article through Twitter to your online PLN or email to a colleague in your school? Why did you make that choice?