As most educators know, Chromebooks have become extremely popular in schools. In my volunteer work in classrooms in the last few years, I’ve encountered them in a middle school classroom in Boston, Massachusetts and in a third-grade class in Chico, California. The university where I work in my day job now has some Chromebooks, too, for students to use in the libraries. I’ve owned a couple of Chromebooks, too.
However, I wonder whether Chromebooks are all that good at working with IF. Especially, it seems that they may be limited in their use with parser-based IF.
Generally, for reading parser-based IF on Chromebooks, I’ve found it necessary to run the stories via the Web. However, with the Chromebooks distributed more of less randomly among students, I haven’t been able to get save and restore to work well at all.
When it comes to writing IF with Inform 7, Playfic stands as the only alternative, as far as I know, for use on a Chromebook. Actually, I admire Playfic a lot. It’s fast and reliable, and my students often like to use it. However, the full Inform application, with its powerful debugging tools, offers real advantages to students who are getting into more involved projects.
So what do you think? Are Chromebooks an obstacle to implementing IF in schools? Can you offer any suggestions on how to use Chromebooks more successfully in working with IF?
There’s also Borogove that let’s you develop Inform 6, Inform 7, Hugo, and Dialog games right in your browser. It works fairly well, although it seems to have issues with the Android software keyboards. It works fine with physical keyboards.
I think that Parchment, supplemented with Quixe, is a wonderful tool. However, the saved files can be a problem, in situations where Chromebooks are distributed randomly to students.
Borogove, of which I wasn’t aware at all, looks like an extremely promising beta. It seems to offer a good Inform 7 experience, and it also seems to make Vorpal much easier to use.
Hey, great question! I’ve been wondering this, too. I don’t know anything specifically about writing IF (but I do play it), but can each student save their IF data to Google Drive?
Yes, students in the classes I’ve worked with had their own Google accounts and could save to Google Drive. Many of their classroom activities centered on Goggle Docs or Google Slides, making the Google Drive accounts even more useful.
However, when reading IF via Parchment/Quixe, it was difficult to save progress effectively because the students would be working with a different Chromebook each day.
When it comes to writing IF, the straightforward saving system of Playfic seemed to work pretty well, though my experience with teaching younger kids via Playfic is quite limited.
I don’t know if you found a decent workaround already, but if not, I would suggest using Fabularium to play the games. It’s a really good android interpreter based on Gargoyle for various text adventure formats.
Fabularium saves your save files right on your internal storage in an easy to access directory. As an example, for me, Anchorhead data is stored in /storage/emulated/0/Fabularium/GameData/ZCODE-5-990206-6B48. I didn’t look it up, but I’m assuming the filename is based on its IFID? To add new games to play, you just drop them into the Games folder inside the Fabularium folder.
Anyway, using this interpreter you can easily copy the save data to/from the Google drive account, which should make it easy to resume your game regardless of which device you last played it on.
Edit: I just realized that not all chromebooks can use Android apps (I thought that was the entire reason for purchasing a chromebook over a real laptop, but what do I know). Fabularium is an android app, so obviously it’ll only work on the ones that can run those.
tayruh seems to have this mostly right, including their “edit,” though, as tayruh implies, there are reasons to buy Chromebooks other than to run Android apps.
Fabularium would be a good solution to the problem with saving. It’s a fine interpreter, and I use it myself, on my Chromebook, which, obviously, supports Android.
However, the Chromebooks that I’ve seen in schools do not have Android enabled. Some of these Chromebooks probably don’t support Android at all, but there may be other reasons not to enable it, such as security concerns.
Adventuron Classroom is a web based authoring and runtime system, but if you are on chromebooks, then it helps if students have their own google accounts, on which to store their work (as files).
