Brian Ernst
Assignments & Activities Archive
Assignment Description
The Twine Project invites students to reconceptualize a previously written paper, ideally a personal narrative or argumentative essay, into a non-linear experience that can easily be shared or published on the internet as a single hypertext markup language (html) file without prior coding knowledge. Twine, an open-source platform that allows users to create interactive “clickable” web pages (similar to “choose your own adventure” books or visual novels), is an ideal means of introducing multimodality, transfer, and reflective writing for students of all skill-levels, but particularly those in First-Year Composition. The goals for this project are twofold. First, to increase digital literacy by having students work with a basic coding language to create branching narrative pathways, manipulate perspective, and experience writing in an unconventional way. Second, this project encourages students to focus on dynamic storytelling by taking their original information or ideas from the previously written essay and transferring them to a new genre for a new audience. The rewritten Twine story is accompanied by a brief metacognitive reflection essay asking students to explain why they made specific decisions behind their transformative work from one medium to another. Finally, the project concludes with a classroom showcase, where authors invite their peers to play through their Twine stories and offer comments or final feedback.