Adventures in Reading

My start in combining educational technology and research was many years ago – the mid-1980s. I was interested in the development of reading skills (upper elementary) and was attempting to develop games that would both develop skill and generate data on performance. At the time (Apple II and II+), the technology experience for the user was predominately text-based. For someone interested in reading, this seemed perfectly acceptable. What the computer offered was  interactivity and it was this combination of words and actions that was appealing to me. Early on exploring the new world of personal technology and learning to program in the process, I encountered text-based adventure games. For me, a basic concept began to emerge. The moves one makes in adventure games depends on your comprehension of the text. Existing games involved more than basic comprehension, but this was mostly a function of purposeful vagueness used to make the games challenging for older players. To emphasize reading skill, we decided to create games in which understanding the “story” made certain moves more productive. Success (leveling up, solving problems) should be associated with comprehending the text of the game. So, our earliest games were a combination of the text-based adventure games of the time and “choose your own” adventure books. I found an early entry in my vita related to this research.

Grabe, M. (1988).  The instructional potential of microcomputer adventure games. Journal of Computer-Based Instruction, 15, 72-77.

I don’t think the journal is still alive. It was the research outlet for an organization I remember as ADCIS. I know this organization was absorbed by another. At some point, technology became main stream and we started publishing in more traditional research journals.

I still like the idea of connection understanding to action; i.e., because I understand what I have read I can do something more successfully. The connection is immediate and embedded when understanding can be applied to making a better choice.

This is a long and possibly unnecessary connection to something I discovered just yesterday. I was scanning the links that “magically” appear on my personal desktop home page and noticed a reference to adventure games on the iPod (actually the reference was to the iPhone but those of us living in North Dakota do not purchase iPhones). The link was to an NPR story on U-Venture repurposing classic “Choose your own adventures” for the iPhone and iPad. It is an interesting interview (read or listen). I immediately spent $3.99 to give it a try (there are other text adventures available, but I was interested in the U-Venture approach).

This is an interesting example for anyone who wants to explore the experience on an iPod or iPad (or iPhone if not in ND). The notion of
reading with a purpose (and a consequence) still makes sense to me. To me, there is something unique in the “choose your own adventure” genre
(what qualifies as a genre anyway). So, if you are looking for content to address the development of comprehension skills and maybe ESL skills,
I think there are some interesting possibilities here.