Kahnawake Survival School / Interactive Storytelling with Twine

The Interactive storytelling workshop with Twine took place at the Kahnawake survival school in the Mohawk territory, Kahnawake. The Skins Team worked with grade 8 English class with eight in-person sessions for approximately 2 hours each. The sessions were split between two classes taught with the same workshop curriculum. Twine is an open-source tool used to create non-linear stories such as visual narratives and decision-based games. With learning this useful tool, Twine, teaches the basics of web development and programming in computational languages such as HTML and CSS.

In this workshop, we assigned goals to the student such as: create a minimum of seven passages, 2 endings or outcomes, and a passage that loops back to a previous passage. For the introductory stages, we had the students start their brainstorming done on paper and pencil to get the gist of storytelling in character development, setting, climax, and more.

For the second session, we introduced Twine’s basic features such as creating passages and typing out their narrative-based games. The goal for this session was to have the students make seven passages and to begin translating their brainstorming sheets onto Twine. In this session, the basics of HTML were introduced to have the texts bold, italicized, underlined, and font color customization.

The third session had additional customization features included in the workshop, such as working with CSS in Twine. With CSS, the students customized the appearance of their in-progress Twine games, such as adding images, shapes, changing the background color, fonts, and more. The skins team organized a Kahoot quiz to encourage engagement within the workshop.

The final session, fourth workshop, was the final finishing touches to the student’s Twine games. It was a workshop that consisted of a lot of work time and playtesting to encourage the importance of game prototyping. At the end of the Twine workshop, the students developed stories ranging from poem pieces, a walk in the forest, and funny meme-based narratives.

The Skins Team is super grateful for the class’s teachers and assistants who helped with the students keep on track. We are excited to continue this relationship with the KSS as we plan more workshops in the future!