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Resources for Using Text Adventures in Education

Teachers are using Quest in their classrooms in a variety of different ways, across a range of different subjects and ages. Playing text adventures engages students with reading and writing in a fun and interactive way. Even more powerful is what can be learned by students when they create their own games.

Writing a story with interactive elements gets those creative-writing juices flowing. And making that story into a game boosts logical thinking, and introduces key concepts of computer programming - but with no previous coding experience required.

Cross-curricular projects

  • Teachers have found that Interactive Fiction is a great choice for cross curricular or Enrichment programmes due to the combination of literacy skills for the story writing elements and logical thinking for game building.
  • There is total flexibility due to the ease with which projects can be structured, whatever suits your situation. Projects can be allocated to individuals each working on their own game or to small groups working together towards one game (which encourages collaboration).
  • Game building provides an open-ended project to suit learners of different abilities. Once the basics have been explained, students can manage their own progress through use of the online tutorials, letting their imaginations run wild and adding as much complexity as they can master.

Examples

ICT / Computing

  • Quest provides a gentle introduction to programming concepts - variables, functions, loops, expressions, objects, etc. - and the visual editor means that students don't need to remember commands or syntax.
  • Being text-based means that students can create complete games without needing to spend time creating graphics. But they can integrate graphics, audio or video too!
  • The Simple Mode in the Quest Editor strips the editor down to the bare essentials so that even young students can get started creating their own games.
  • For older students, Quest has a full programming language behind the visual editor, which can be accessed by clicking the Code View button. And for even higher levels, the full source code of Quest is available - a large, active, open source project using C#, VB.NET, Javascript and more.

Examples

English

  • Playing text adventure games is an interesting alternative to reading a static book - encouraging students to engage more and understand what they have read.
  • Creating text adventure games is a great way of exploring creative writing, and it's easy to get started.

Examples

Languages

Modern Foreign Languages

Playing or creating games in another language - a great way to combine reading and writing in another tongue. Quest currently supports English, French, Spanish, German, Portuguese, Italian, Dutch, Romanian and Esperanto, and it is straightforward to translate into other languages.

English as a Foreign Language

Joe Pereira's blog and Scoop.it for information on game-based learning particularly for EFL.

Other

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