I had the pleasure of running a brief summer seminar for the online private school I’ve contracted with the last five years. It was a total of six sessions spread across three weeks, each only thirty minutes. The topic was Choose Your Own Adventure, and the handful of kids sure did exactly that.
My intention was for them to create a second-person narrative in Google Slides, allowing them to easily link to different scenes within the deck. It’s a low-effort way to begin that narrows the focus on the mechanics of their story. We would have planning time, some writing time, some revision time, and cap it off by getting a quick demo of whatever they had made. We loosely followed that core plan, but what the students chose to create during this time was all over the place in the best way.
The median entry was a video game. Ambitious, fun, making use of modern tools to rapidly build onto their worlds. All of this still achieved the core goal of the workshops—formulating a story that someone else could inhabit and make decisions in—but I had lost track of what was possible for a tween to create with technology. Leaving AI tools aside (which I’m rather confident a few of the students did not, though I didn’t bother taking a stance on that), there are accessible platforms that exist to let kids express themselves through the modern media they understand.
Two of the kids made fantasy pixel art RPGs. One was classically medieval, and the other was set in empirical samurai-era Japan. Both kids were so thoroughly enjoying themselves, throwing their effort into these projects in and out of workshop time. They engaged with the questions I asked about the story behind the games, and were genuinely interested in moving beyond a showy technical demonstration into something that could be genuinely moving, whether that was due to humor or heartfelt emotion.
A pair of sisters opted to work together on an open-world, exploratory multiplayer game. While they didn’t quite nail their initial goal of creating a modern urban fantasy, they were obviously good collaborators and had immense fun writing specific interactions that guided the player to new locations. It was frenetic and funny in exactly the way I genuinely enjoy.
Another student had the right spirit. He was using Twine to build a proper Choose Your Own Adventure game, just like I did when creating a web version of Dream Sequence. It’s fair to say our sensibilities don’t perfectly match, but he had as much ambition as anyone. He was writing many dozens of endings, all of which were ways a blue-ringed octopus, the animal the player was inhabiting, could perish in nature. Morbid, sure. But just about in line with a kid in his early teens.
Finally, one student came in with no priors except a willingness to engage and the confidence and sense of safety to create something they found fun. With Google Slides in hand, a love of K-Pop and talent survival shows led to a few layers of a well-written story. They were proud to share what they built regardless of the showy context provided by others, and that was awesome to see.
I’d love to run a seminar like this with more time available and with more focus on story elements, but the goal of a summer activity like this is not any specific content knowledge. It’s not about tangible improvement or going deep into a niche concept. As long as the kids who sat on Zoom with me for three hours of their summer left with a sense of fun and wonder, I was pleased. And thanks to their own creative minds, freeform approach, and shockingly great mutual support, they had even more to do with that success than I did.