So I’m going back to square one and starting with:

What is the problem I am trying to solve? Well I do know this and it’s more or less that overall, K-12 schools are performing poorly, we have poor graduation rates, poor literacy rates, and highly complex classroom learning variances.

The primary problem that I believe Textfyre and technology in general can solve is the lesson-plan variance problem. There is research, especially in urban school districts, that show any given classroom requires varied lesson plans for the makeup of the students. There is also research that the very best teachers can handle at most three different lesson plans. Some classrooms require five or more. Clearly there is no way to make teachers more effective if the best they can do is lower than the average requirement. Technology can solve this problem by offering blended learning or ILP’s (Individual Learning Plans). In fact, there is a very strong effort by school districts around the country to procure technical solutions that promote ILP’s.

Within the ILP structure there is a need for immediate feedback to the student, to the teacher, and to the parents. There’s a need for tracking progress towards college access and a need to measure and challenge students to meet and exceed their grade-level requirements. There’s also a need to develop cognitive skills, problem-solving, collaboration, and more.

Many of these requirements, along with the new Common Core Standards, are the root dynamics in pushing a service through the IF medium.

But we need to go back to the beginning and cite all of the existing research for the basis of the IF medium in classrooms and founding a new ILP service.

We also need to build relationships with a number of schools, teachers, administrators, and learning specialists. We have the technology. We need the educators to support and hone the technology properly.

So that’s where I’m going. No more coding or writing. No more meetings. I’m setting all of that aside so I can go back and build personal relationships with people.

If you’re interested in our discussion, let me know. I’m interested in people that can speak strongly about interactivity, gaming, education, lesson plans, assessment, blended learning, and individual learning plans. We have a Yammer account where we’re having these discussions.

One of the places we’re looking to for cash our federal and private education grants. We just missed a couple of federal grants in February. There just wasn’t enough time to prepare the type of proposal that’s expected. An RFP from the Gates Foundation was recently publicized and we’re making a concerted effort to complete a proposal for this grant.

In the area of product development, we’ve brought in a new team member that has a learning science and assessment science background. We’re working to redesign existing processes to ones based on IF constructs. This process has just begun.

This has led me to think about our business model. We’ve been discussing the possibility of offering all of our content for free and charging for the assessment and reporting features. These are the features that teachers and administrators would use to evaluate their students progress in areas that can be measured against the new Common Core State Standards. What do we gain by offering our stories for free? What do we lose? These are the questions we’re asking ourselves.

In other news, I am going to add maps and hints to the existing online version of The Shadow in the Cathedral and make it permanently apart of the Textfyre learning structure. It will remain free. I also plan to promote it towards classroom supplemental reading use.

One of our other team members is actively working relationships with teachers to test our service. This is an ongoing struggle since teachers have very little time. If you know a teacher that would be interested in helping us work through piloting, please send them my way. We’re focused on 4th through 8th grade.

So I branched the code, ripped out all of the classroom features, and implemented a revised version of The Shadow in the Cathedral. If I can figure it out, I plan to do Secret Letter too, but that code is a mess.

You can play, for free, the online version of The Shadow in the Cathedral right now.

It’s a bit sluggish at times, although not terribly bad. It’s certainly usable. I’m considering a few tweaks to speed things up, but the performance is in large part a factor of the game’s size. It was not designed for a client-server platform…it was designed for a PC interpreter.

I have to thank Jimmy Maher for the Kindle port for a great deal of the bottlenecks being removed. Jimmy has a knack for finding bad Inform 7 code and rewriting it so that things perform well. This version of Shadow is a descendant of those changes.

The caveats I offer in playing it online includes the following:

1. this does not change the price or availability of the Kindle, Android, or Hobbyist versions.
2. if you have suggestions, please use the Feedback button on the lower right. This leads to a User Voice feedback dialogue where you can offer your feedback.
3. at any time, I may make changes to the game file, which will reset all sessions to the beginning of the game. One feature I’m contemplating is the ability to have the system upload the new game, then fire off a script to rerun all historical turns in the new engine. I can think of a number of ways to enable this, but I’m undecided.
4. if anyone has any art or music they’d like to share in the online version, feel free. I view this version as a sort of artistic endeavor combined with usability research. This goes for CSS changes as well. I can easily provide alternate CSS implementations.
5. the underlying client-side code is copyrighted. look, but don’t copy.

I can’t say that this will remain online forever, but that’s my intention.

Enjoy!

First of all, we had our second conference call with The Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation. This went well and we’re looking forward to another conversation in January to work on a specific grant proposal.

We’ve also talked to Knewton, a company that specializes in adaptive recommendation systems that specifically target how students learn. We both felt our two companies had a high potential for integrating services and research data. we’ll be following up with them soon.

We’ve also been talking to New Schools Venture Fund and once we get through the pilot phase, they may become a valuable partner.

Our next steps include usability testing in a few Chicago area schools and then the pilot in spring.

We do have one critical need as far as personnel is concerned. We’re looking for a seasoned academic research partner that studies how students learn and can guide is on the bigger picture. This person would probably work with our story development team and Knewton to determine the taxonomy of any given subject matter. That taxonomy would lead directly to the types of stories and story content we develop.

This has become a very interesting pivot to date. We’re looking forward to the results of our testing and pilot to see where Textfyre fits in the classroom.

One last thing. If you want to do a little usability testing for us, just send is an email and we’ll connect you with the current online application (as bare as it is).

We’re about to start working in schools with teachers and students to further refine the system and we’re talking to Gates Foundation and New Schools Venture Fund to see how we align with their programs.

I’d like to extend an invitation to anyone that wants to join the evaluation and refinement process. I can give you access to the system and you can offer your thoughts on the user interface and system overall.

In testing your vision, you are building a minimal viable product or MVP. You show people what you’re doing, get feedback, adjust, present again, get feedback, adjust again. You do this any number of times until you either have something people love or your vision blurs, pun intended.

So Textfyre is now on the path of MVP (it’s always been a lean startup…but that’s another story).

We’ve identified the content we want to deliver and how we want to deliver it. Now we’re in the process of actually building it out, on paper first, and then in an actual sample story game.

We plan to show this to our own acamdemic personnel as well as teachers and students in the coming weeks. This will give us the feedback we need build a great product, or pivot. I’ll talk about the pivot potential some other time. For now, it’s MVP time.

The original goal was to develop traditional Infocom-like fictional games and try to sell them in bookstores and to school libraries or to get them in classrooms as supplemental reading. I really had very little experience with such an endeavor and a large part of the process of developing Textfyre was to learn how to build a business. This was all in or before 2007.

In the first two years we produced two games with a third remaining incomplete. Secret Letter is probably targeted at 3rd or 4th grade readers (based on current lexical requirements in schools) and has an intentional Disney-like princess theme. Shadow in the Cathedral is much more accessible with its Steampunk theme. I’m actually very proud of both of these games, have played them many times myself, and enjoy both for different reasons. Ian and Jon were very clever about a lot of things in Shadow while Mike was, at least from my perspective, brilliant at capturing the tone and intentions that I asked of him.

In the years since those first two publications, the economy and “other things” put a lot of the business side push of Textfyre on hold. There simply was no time or money for me to push anything and it had become clear that my first few business plans were never going to fly. Instead of closing the business, which I had thought to do many times, I simply set it aside and used it as a conduit for my daytime consulting practice.

In the last twelve months the economy has improved (although not for everyone, I’m very aware) and Chicago has become a burgeoning market for digital start-ups. GroupOn and GrubHub have gotten a lot of people very excited and the new digs at 1871 have made it possible for entrepreneurs to come together on a daily basis for a small amount of money (I pay $125/month for nights and weekend space).

This has opened a lot of doors for Textfyre. It’s given me a place to bring people together to talk about building a company. It offers “office hours” from mentors and investors. It has the StarterLeague.Com (formerly CodeAcademy.Org) which teaches computer classes to people who travel to Chicago from all over the world. It has Excelerate Labs, where every year ten start-ups are chosen to work at 1871 on their business, with mentoring and support. A lot of start-up business is done through Built In Chicago, a website and group that hosts networking events, awards ceremonies, and more. Another group, Technori, hosts pitch nights every month at the Chase Auditorium in downtown Chicago.

In the last six months I took a long look at what I’d done with Textfyre and what was still possible. I knew traditional IF was going to be a tough sell without a lot of money or a built-in-audience. I have neither so I had to look at other angles. The education/school angle had been dismissed in the past because there were very complex barriers to entry. At all angles, it was just impossible for start-ups to disrupt anything in the education world. Something changed all of that…

The iPad and the continued adoption of computers in schools has altered almost all of the perceptions of education processes and at all levels people want things to change and are actively seeking new methods and tools. There’s a new Common Core Standard that needs to be adopted over the next few years. Students are coming into primary schools (K-5) with more expertise with computers than their teachers. The system was not and is not prepared for these students.

This leaves open a host of opportunities that many small and large companies are tackling from many different angles. But the one thing that has changed the most is that start-ups are being heard and being funded. Education funding has doubled in the last year and is expected to be the number one source of funding for years to come.

With this new understanding, I started to put a management team together which is complete and we are working and meeting every week. It’s a very strong and passionate team that includes sales, marketing, curriculum, art, and technology expertise. We’ve had meetings with Microsoft Learning and The Gates Foundation and from those meetings we’ve developed a clear path to success. We have a new mission, a new plan, and a part of the plan is the use of the underlying engine, world model, and natural language parser used in Interactive Fiction game development. We’re going to do non-fiction supplemental curriculum and it will have a lot of bells and whistles that you’d never see or need in a traditional IF game, but it’s going to be great.

We recently updated the entire Textfyre website so that it reflects most of the changes we see in our mission.

Of course we still love traditional IF and we plan to work that into our future, so if you have a game you may be hearing from me at some point, asking to put it into our system as supplemental material.

Textfyre is reborn as an education technology company and this is just the beginning.

http://www.amazon.com/dp/B008TCVYHE

To start, I recently joined a digital start-up office in Chicago called 1871. So far this has only provided a workplace in downtown Chicago, but it has amenities that will help us grow.

I put out feelers for new team members, all on the business side. I always knew that Textfyre could not truly be successful without partners and now I’m actively seeking people to fill roles like finance, marketing, product development manager, website geek, and so on.

I still have all of my interactive fiction contacts, although some are less available than others. I’m pretty sure though that if Textfyre finds cash, we’ll be able to hire enough IF talent to do the work I envision.

I have not signed anyone to agreements yet, but I have found people who may fill finance, marketing, art direction, and investor relation roles. Once these positions are solidified, I will introduce the people to you through this blog and on the upcoming face lift to the Textfyre.Com website, which is not the website I had promised in recent months. That website will be turned into a pay-for service, which is a topic for another post. The new website will be corporate, informational, and professionally implemented (um, not by me).

I will continue to push our two flagship fictional IF games through the Kindle, iPad, Android, and soon Windows 8, but these types of products are unlikely to be our focus for an unknown period of time. We’ll get back to traditional IF at some point, but we’re going to work on something else for the near-term.

I have also been very busy networking and this has been paying off in the highest level of contacts. If we’re to succeed, we’re going to need every partner we can muster, and getting to know the bigger players will help us define and execute our goals all the more efficiently.

If you’re interested in pitching, we’re going to be meeting at 1871 regularly. Drop me a note and tell me how you think you can make Textfyre successful.

Jack Marchetti’s is one such man. Jack is a 32 year old screenwriter from Chicago and what’s different about Jack is that he’s about to go blind. Not today or tomorrow, but in a few years. This makes for a compelling story. A young man, in the prime of his life, happy and successful as a computer technologist, but faced with a certain future of gradually losing his sight and any ability to direct a movie. It’s one thing for people to have dreams and say, “Well, I can always get back to that later in life.” In Jack’s case, that’s exactly what he cannot do. If he’s going to direct a movie, it has to be right now.

Jack has worked very hard to get one particular script on film. 4 of a Kind is a story about four friends that find themselves in an impossible situation. Motives are unclear, priorities are screwed up, and things happen. Very bad things happen. It’s a very good story with very compelling characters. The script finished in the top 100 of the third season of Project Greenlight, the brainchild of Matt Damon and Ben Affleck.

I worked with Jack on two projects as a computer consultant and I’d recommend his work to anyone, not just on his technical credentials, but his affable and intelligent nature. He has the right sense of communication to be an excellent leader on a movie set and I sincerely doubt he’d have any problems working with any level of talent or budget. He’s focused and ready to work.

So with all of that said, I urge you to visit the 4 of a Kind Kickstarter crowd sourcing page and pitch into an important moment in Jack’s life. You can also follow the campaign and eventually the movie-making progress on Twitter and Facebook.