Another Color Of Hope, for those of you who missed it the first time around, is a "choose your own adventure" style intelligence training game that I have been developing. I use a free development platform called Twine to create this work of - as it is known formally - interactive fiction.
I have been wanting to design a game to teach or, at least, introduce a particular intelligence analysis method to my students for quite some time. Interactive fiction seemed to be a good way to create a more engaging environment for learning this particular method.
I am being a little coy here about which analytic method I am trying to teach on purpose. Part of what great games do is teach without teaching. Much of the learning is baked into the the gameplay in such a way that the student/player doesn't necessarily know they are being taught. Much of my research into game-based learning suggests that this is far more difficult to do than you might expect but I thought this experiment was worth the effort (I do think it is pretty obvious which method I am trying to teach by the end of Chapter 2, though...).
If you have not played Chapter 1 you can access it here:
Another Color Of Hope (Chapter 1)
(And you can leave a review of the chapter here.)
And you can access Chapter 2 here:
Another Color of Hope (Chapter 2)
(And you can leave a review of it here!)
Don't hesitate to share both chapters with others and feel free to use them in class if you think they are helpful!
Friday, March 3, 2017
Another Color of Hope - Chapter 2 Now Available (Free!)
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3 comments:
I'd love to know if this achieves the teaching aims you are intending. How many chapters will there be?
Liz,
We are sort of testing that right now. These chapters are written for a very particular set of students (freshmen) at a very specific point in our intel studies curriculum (second semester when they are taking introduction to intelligence analytic methods). My observation was that students were understanding - barely - the mechanics of one of the methods we teach but had little real sense of it and were not very good at using it later on. My idea was to create a piece of interactive fiction that would walk them through the process from the most basic elements up through the more conceptually challenging parts of it and to do that in the form of a story. My earlier research into games-based learning suggests that the best I can hope for is a partial success. Interactive fiction, as you likely already know is not everyone's cup of tea. For those who don't like the genre or the approach, I expect it will have little learning effect. For some, though, it might make this method a bit more accessible. We'll see!
Kris
Oh, and I am not sure how many chapters there will be. I am working on chapter 3 now. It is going to be where I bring almost all of the elements of this methodology into play and, as a result, will likely be the longest. The way I write it might be summer before it gets done...
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