Play Wikipedia!

Back in the mists of time, like the 1980s, there was a genre of computer games called Interactive Fiction. This is where there is a story, and you’re part of it. You might remember those “choose your adventure” books where that say something like “if you want to go to France, go to page 17”. Well, Interactive Fiction is the computer version of those books. And the king of Interactive Fiction was Infocom. They made games like Zork, Deadline, Suspended, Moonmist, Trinity, and many more. There weren’t graphics, just text, and you filled in the graphics with your imagination.

West of House
You are standing in an open field west of a white house, with a boarded front door. There is a small mailbox here.

You can choose to go to the house, look around, read the letter in the mailbox, pick up objects, etc. Oh, you can play Zork here.

So what does this have to do with Wikipedia? Well, now you can play that in the same way. Choose a starting place, and see what’s there. Say “go north” (or just “n”) for short. Wander around the Colosseum, and more.

Go exploring!

Teaching with Portals

Portal 2 is a game where you have to use portal guns to create teleportation fields to move around and survive. I’ve head about teachers using it for lessons, especially for physics, but I haven’t had the chance to look into it. There is a website teachwithportals.com which has lesson plans for use with Portal 2. Surprisingly with Language Arts lessons as well as science. I’ll have to look into this.