As the summer winds down, the IFTF Education Committee (EdCom) is looking back at the amazing gathering at IFTF’s first Narrascope conference in Boston, and foward to our next steps.

In June at Narrascope, EdCom ran the evening workshops. Brendan Desilets offered a session on approaches to teaching IF; Chris Klimas and Stuart Moulthrop gave an introduction to Twine; and Anasastasia Salter and Judith Pintar covered the basics of Inform 7. On Saturday we did a “Meet the EdCom” Panel where we shared our experiences teaching IF and our thoughts about the wide range of pedagogical reasons why anyone would want to! We’re interested in uses of IF in classroom from primary school to graduate school, and in disciplines across the humanities, social sciences and STEM.

At the end of that panel presentation, we announced the creation of an IF Educator’s Forum on intfiction.org, as a dedicated space for IF educators to gather. Here we can share our experiences, resources, curricula and games, ask questions, and get feedback and support for writing educational IF, teaching IF, or teaching with IF. It is also a launching site for future community-creating and community-building efforts and initiatives.

If you’re an educator who uses or teaches IF in your classrooms, or would like to do, we want to hear from you! Please drop an email to the forum and introduce yourself.

We’ve also made a short survey, so IFTF EdCom can know more about who we are as a community of educators, including wannabes, and to get a collective sense of what we all teach, what resources we have to share, and what we need.

Please share this blog with your IF colleagues and in your educational networks! Our goal for this fall is to get started building an exciting, fun, and generative IF educator’s community network.