Last month I worked with the ever excellent Octopus Collective and young people in Year 6 at Black Combe Primary school in Millom, Cumbria to develop some interactive text adventures using Inform.
Starting off we made them play The Hobbit on a zx spectrum emulator and some adventure game classics like Hitch Hikers Guide to the Galaxy and Zork. For people used to playing contemporary games, to go back to games based purely on grammatical logic and imagination and no pictures was quite a leap.
You can play the games in-browser from these links and you can play Abandon Hope one of my favourites here.
They came up with a fantastic series of games though, bending the reality of their school into all kinds of directions. Apparently they are already working on their sequels!
Thanks to all the supportive staff at the school and the endless enthusiasm of Peter Clark who built the best whiteboard hack Ive ever seen: its on the floor, kids can walk on it and its about 6m x 3m wide. Millom has a lovely resource in that school.
