Computer-based interactive fiction offers teachers and students fresh and exciting ways to improve their thinking and reading. I hope that this page will encourage teachers and kids to use this remarkable, but largely ignored, resource. Please feel free to contact me, if I can be of any help at all.
“Teaching With Interactive Fiction” centers on four essays, each concerning an important reason to use IF in the classroom. These reasons are
—to develop critical and creating thinking,
–to improve reading skills for better comprehension,
—to enhance reading fluency, and
—to explore the writing process in a new way.
Each of the four essays is fairly lengthy, though they are divided into sections, which may allow for some judicious skipping around. The essays do not assume any previous knowledge of interactive fiction.
“Teaching With Interactive Fiction also offers
—suggestions for working with five IF stories, Arthur, The Firebird, Winter Wonderland, Photopia, and The Enterprise Incidents;
—a “Top Seventy IF Stories” list; and
—some information about obtaining interactive fiction.
