Answering a need with no solution with an all-original
“Choose Your Own Adventure”-style Teaching Platform
When professor & author Laura Hartman brought me her idea for a decision-tree style classroom experience for groups of students to take business ethics case studies together with shared outcomes, the first thing that popped in my mind was the seminal gamebook series. The second thing was how one goes about authoring those 2nd-person style experiences, and wishing it was easy to write all of the “pages” without having any dead ends in the storylines.
It was that wish I followed when I went about designing and building this Ruby/RoR based live shared group outcome manager web app, which allows teachers to create gamebook-style classes and experience tickets for students to redeem which takes them to the correct waiting room and classroom for them to take the class. In the class students go from page to page, choosing from a series of decisions individually and moving along their experience based on the majority decision. This is particularly useful for teaching ethics, which can often be as much or more about how to view & analyze a situation than any single specific answer.
Originally started in PHP, I pivoted mid-project to Ruby to implement live server interactions to convert otherwise static web pages into a quasi-live gaming environment, where students interact with each other in realtime and teachers create courses and administer class access & results. The coding challenge of learning a new for me/relatively new in general language (along with RoR) matched well with the project’s overall challenge of solo-building an interactive learning game and earned me my only Stack Overflow silver badges.
I delivered the working alpha build in December 2011, and presented it at the Fifth ISBEE World Congress conference in 2012. Along with solving a previously-unsolvable problem, creating a tool to make it easier to educate each other and ourselves, and the honor of speaking to ethics educators from around the world about the app, I gained a great deal of front & backend knowledge and principles which I continue to use today.
