CYOA or Choose Your Own Adventure were a series of books in which you had to read and decide at some point what the main character should do next. After choosing one of the available options, you would have to go directly to whichever page the book was guiding you to, and the story would continue. Another book collection, like Lone Wolf, mixed CYOA with TTRPG elements like character statistics, inventories and combat rolls to add one extra layer of difficulty and engagement.
If you grew up reading CYOA books,
like I did, you have probably thought at some point about their narrative structure, their building blocks and also, perhaps, you may be familiar with the image on the left.
That is the structure of one out of many of the CYOA books that there are out there, and by showing it graphically like a mind map, we can start finding new ways of applying it on education.
The mind map structure could hint towards the type of lecture notes we all have always prepared to prepare for our exams. One node connects to several others and it opens the way for new, related information. In many subjects this structure could be used by the teacher to introduce a topic and to allow their students to explore it and discover it freely. It could be applied, for example, in History lessons, by allowing the students to choose where they want to go, who they want to read about or which facts they feel more inclined to further investigate.
This activity could also be used to assess our students' knowledge by allowing them to follow a path based on what they think the right answer should be, giving them a code at the end of the activity that could be translated by the teacher into their real marks. Also, by adding images, videos or sound, the whole experience will feel more engaging and interesting, keeping our students' attention for longer periods of time focused on the learning materials.
One interesting way of creating CYOA-format stories is with Twine, an open-source tool for telling interactive, nonlinear stories. With such online tools we can design the structure and add the textual elements and multimedia to each node as we find necessary. On the other hand, we could use tools like Twine in Project-Based Learning, having our students work on a story and its structure, the ways that story would branch out, how the characters would evolve in each different "story-line" and what the outcomes for each choice would probably look like.
This use of a CYOA-structure PBL would be a great project to have our students practice their social skills (interaction, empathy, negotiation) and their writing skills, as well as boosting their creativity throughout the whole process.
References
· CYOA - Choose Your Own Adventure
· Lone Wolf. CYOA book collection with RPG elements. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lone_Wolf_(gamebooks)
· Twine. An open-source tool for telling interactive, nonlinear stories.
https://twinery.org/ · Project-Based Learning. PBLWorks https://www.pblworks.org/what-is-pbl
I had the opportunity to work in a digital publishing house and I can assure you CYOAs are just great. Amazing post with very interesting information! Thanks a lot Alex, you always know what to write about. Looking forward to reading your next post!