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  Teaching HTML with Hypertext Fiction

  Continuing a project I worked on during Mozilla Service Week, I’ve been working on my curriculum for a workshop I will be teaching in Nov for the first time. The class is called Where the Wild Things Could Be… and will be through the 826 Seattle writing workshop. It will have about 8 students that are 11-14 years old. The goal is to teach HTML. Hypertext Fiction, like the Choose Your Own Adventure book series, is a narrative with multiple story paths and endings. The web is a natural medium for this type of story. I’m hoping that teaching kids how to write hypertext fiction is a natural way to teach them how to create HTML. A major impediment to learning the basics of HTML is all the web publishing cruft:

  Text editors Files FTP Hostnames and Hosting

  All of this crap is an accident of history and seems like a big stumbling block, before you get to the juicy stuff of HTML, CSS, and JavaScript. The approach I’m taking is to create a web application that paves over these four problems. The student will have create a short page name and then get an edit box. This gives them a body tag and let’s them create from there. Saving the page publishes it. Linking involves using the “short page name” of another page in your HTML code. This workshop is only 2 hours, so I will focus on teaching hypertext fiction basics and the following HTML tags: A, P, UL, and LI. Students will use Sticky Notes and a whiteboard to coordinate the story and page flow. I’ve looked around a little for a web application, but nothing is perfect, so I’ll probably write my own. R.Y.O.H is a clever new project, but doesn’t allow HTML coding and it’s quite a bit different than my wireframes. Wordpress is too distracting. Wikimedia is close but doesn’t allow HTML and I don’t want to just teach wiki markup. Do you know of a good hypertext fiction web tool? I’m creating the curriculum online. I’d love feedback. I’ll post and link to more materials as I create them. Steal my work. Improve it.

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