intfiction.org

Hi,
I'm teaching some bright 12-13 year old boys about if in a couple of months' time. I would love to get them going with inform 7... My own expertise is still fairly novice though and I feel that it could be an intimidating program for them. What would really help is to have some templates that they could write into... I realise that there are lots of egs on the inform 7 site but I'm after something a little more 'vanilla' than this, along the lines of a fill the blanks exercise. Moving on, it would be amazing to have a series of templates which introduced easy but gradually more complex puzzles to implement. Has anyone got anything like this? If not, would anyone be able to help in creating a short series of templates? All suggestions welcome.

I would look at Aaron Reed's book Creating Interactive Fiction with Inform 7, which takes a workbook-like approach. It's not quite a template, in that you still have to type in the code yourself (depending on what your teaching focus is, this may be an Excellent Thing or an annoyance); but it is still a step-by-step, series-of-exercises thing.

You might want to take a look at that weekly coding tasks that has just recently started up. The idea here is to help out beginners get to grips with Inform 7 by attempting various coding puzzles.

Hope this helps.

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"Will you stop breaking the fourth wall? It's costing me an absolute fortune to replace it!"

I'd say those exercises are way too advanced climbingstars.

I'll add my vote to using Aaron Reed's book. It's what got me started and is a really good tool.



There was a good step-by-step for teaching kids of that age TADS 2 quite a few years back. It had them coding their house. Sorry, can't find it from my phone (if it's still around). Maybe do that?

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Ever stop to think and forget to start again?

Hi,

I've got the Reed book so I'll definitely dig it out after that advice. However, I felt that parts of sanddancer might be a touch mature - all the flashback sequences etc. Has anyone done a hierarchy of generic puzzles? What I mean by this is say a list where 1) easiest = go <direction> 2) get and give an object etc ... This might provide a nice little ladder in terms of the implementation side for them (I realise you could modify the difficulty of the above in all kinds of ways but a general list for a small location)... All suggestions for finding or creating material really appreciated again.

You should check out this handy list of I7 documentation. The Inform IDE has a recipe book of mini example games. All of these are placed on a difficulty rating of four stars. If you go to the Inform Recipe book, and click to arrange the games in thematic order, then you can get something very much like a hierarchy of generic puzzles. From these you could easily pick a suite of one-star games to work through. Disenchantment Bay is a set of 11 simple examples that add up to a fuller scenario, working through these might be a good educative experience.

There is a series of handouts for "Getting Started with Inform 7" from http://www.hpiweb.com/newmedia/, that seem useful.

Brendan Desilets has this http://if1.home.comcast.net/~if1/inform_7.htm as part of a web site about "Teaching and Learning with Interactive Fiction".

And, of course, there's also Jim Aikin's Inform 7 Handbook, which I think was intended for the same audience as yours.

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Man ska inte tro allt man tänker.

You're not alone. I've spoken to a number of teachers who have wanted to get their students writing text adventure games, and they all found that Inform was just too complicated and intimidating (the natural language may be easy to read, but for newbies it can be frustrating to write, as you have to know exactly the right way to express yourself - difficult if you're new to programming).

It's early days but several teachers are having great results so far with Quest: http://www.textadventures.co.uk/quest/

Because it is a point and click interface, it's easier to get started. You don't need to know the right way of saying what an object and a room is - you can just click the "Add object" or "Add room" button and fill in the template fields.

Kristian Still has a large number of blog posts on using Quest in the classroom here: http://www.kristianstill.co.uk/wordpress/tag/quest/

I spent a very interesting day in February using Quest with exactly this age group: http://www.textadventures.co.uk/blog/20 ... ns-school/ - I was really pleased with how well they took to it.

Gideon Williams and Kristian Still have created some resources for this age group which you may be able to reuse, so I can put you in contact with them if you're interested.

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Quest - create and play text adventure games in your browser

On the other hand, that is exactly the skill that you need to learn if you want to learn to program. While students might be able to do more in a short time with a point-and-click or menu-based interface, they will presumably learn less.

I7 is a great language to read. But I bet even very experienced writers get caught up occasionally. This is because I7 totally fails the Principle of Least Astonishment. How to fix that... now that's a hard question.