The kids in your classroom may not have been around when the choose-your-own-adventure books were popular in the ‘80’s and 90’s, but the concept of an interactive story will still engage them. There’s something about taking charge of a story’s direction that has broad appeal, and your students will want to see if they can find their way to a happy ending or will end up with some less-than-desirable outcome.

Making your own choose-your-own-adventure story is not difficult with the use of Google Forms. You can create a story yourself to get younger students reading. Or you can challenge older students to create stories, prompting them using their imagination as well as their writing skills. Here’s how you do it.

Decide on Your Adventure

It’s best to a start creating a choose-your-own-adventure story with a little bit of planning. Decide on the adventure you want to lead your reader on. Here’s a simple example to get your ideas rolling. Next, map out the choices you want your reader to make. You can use this template to keep track of what each choice will lead to. Having your story idea on outlined will simplifying things once you get going in Google Forms.

Create the Form

Once you have your story template filled out, you’re ready to create your form. Go to “Start a new form” and select a blank form. Highlight “untitled form” and insert your title there. Enter the introduction to your story – the setting or scenario that sets up the first choice – as the “form description.” Then put the first set of choices for your reader, one as “option 1” and “option 2.” Option 2 will appear when you click “add option.”

On the bottom right corner of this form, you want to select “Make this question required.”

Create Further Content by Adding Sections

Look back at your template and count the total number of possible outcomes readers could chose as they work their way through your story – not just the end choices, but all the choices. Add this number of sections to your form. Title each section so that you can keep track of them!

Now, go back to the first set of choices you set up, and click on the three dots in the bottom right corner and choose “go to section based on answer.” Once you’ve selected this, you’ll see that when you click on your options, you see a drop-down list of all the sections that answer can send the reader to. Choose the appropriate section that logically continues the story for each answer. Then follow your template to fill in the story details and options for each section of your story. Remember to select “make this question required” and “go to section based on answer” at each step along the way.

Adding Features

You can use the “add image” feature on the menu on the right of the form to add pictures to your story. You can also add video. If you’d like to add critical thinking to this assignment you can require your students to add explanations for their choices rather than simply click through the story. Add a second question following your first and select “short answer” to capture student answers. You can even set a minimum number of characters for a response.

For additional information, see these instructions on Google.com.

There you have it! A fun exercise that can develop your students’ reading, critical thinking, and/or creative writing.