Any experienced technology educator knows engagement and motivation are key to a student's learning. Of the many techniques for stimulating engagement and motivation among learners, storytelling and game creation have good track records of success, and writing interactive fiction is a great way to combine both of those techniques.
Interactive fiction has a respectable history in computing, stretching back to the text-only adventure games of the early 1980s, and it's enjoyed a new popularity recently. There are many technology tools that can be used for writing interactive fiction, but the two that will be considered here, Twine[1] and Ren'Py[2], are ideal for the task. Each has different strengths that make it more attractive for particular types of projects.
Twine
Twine is a popular cross-platform open source interactive fiction system that developed out of the HTML- and JavaScript-based TiddlyWiki[3]. If you're not familiar with Twine, multimedia artist and Opensource.com contributor Seth Kenlon's article on how he uses Twine to create interactive adventure games[4] is a great introduction to the tool.
One of Twine's advantages is that it produces a single, compiled HTML file, which makes it easy to distribute and play an interactive fiction work on any system with a reasonably modern web browser. But this comes at a cost: While it will support graphics, sound files, and embedded video, Twine is somewhat limited by its roots as a primarily text-based system (even though it has developed a lot over the years).
This is very appealing to new learners who can rapidly produce something that looks good and is fun to play. However, when they want to add visual effects, graphics, and multimedia, learners can