Inform 7 Hour of Code Tutorial (Work in Progress)

I have been working on an interactive Inform 7 tutorial with the hope of using it with some middle school students during Computer Science Education Week (Dec 8-14). Right now it’s hosted on Cloud 9:

Inform Tutorial

My goal with this template based approach is to allow students to proceed through the tutorial under the direction of a teacher not familiar with Inform and to use their own ideas and own words from the beginning, rather than starting with purely stock examples. The plan is that students will fill out a prewriting document (as yet unwritten) in advance with their names, descriptions, and other texts so the focus is on the coding aspects at first, rather than composing and typing.

As I say, it is not yet finished, but I think what I have so far qualifies as a working draft. I would be grateful for your thoughts, ideas, bug reports, etc.

Disclaimer: I’m not affiliated with Code.org. Hour of Code is their trademark.

I didn’t go all the way through, but this is super cute! I really like that it starts off with text boxes that it’s not possible to break – I’ve had a hard time with textual code languages (as opposed to something graphical like Scratch) with kids of that age because it’s really easy for a typo to derail their progress right at the beginning, before they even see something cool happen. One solution to this for me has been to go one-on-one, do most of the code typing for them, and hand over the keyboard for item names and room descriptions – that is, you’ve automated my method.

One thing is that you might want to have some boring default names/descriptions so that the explanatory text makes sense even if somebody just idly clicks through.

Oooh, I am really digging this.