It has taken a great deal of editing and debugging but finally we think that the world is ready to read about The Adventures of Alex.

Last year, in the summer term, Kerry Murdock and I spent a series of eight Fridays at Victoria Park Academy with their sixty Year 5 students. Together we worked on a project that combined coding with creative writing. Starting with the idea of ‘cliffhangers’ and inspired by Choose Your Own Adventure stories we plunged into writing a multi-voice multi-strand narrative.

Our idea had been to start off with some untrammeled test writing and coding before cracking on with a more structured story. When we got to the point of dumping the test writing and starting the story proper we realised that many of the students were highly committed to what they had written and keen to extend these stories. We plugged together all the random writing we had at this point and discovered a demented story with incredible uninhibited energy. It was crazy, but we like it and so we were secretly pleased when the student’s voted to both continue with their existing stories and splice them with a new, more structured space narrative.

In order to make this hybrid monster in any way comprehensible we changed the name of the main protagonist in all the stories to Alex. We wrote a few nodal narrative stations to loop stories back to and start them off from. It’s still not perfect but it’s a fun ride: see what you think. Please do report back if you get stuck in any annoying loops or dead ends, we will fix these when we learn of them.

So here we are, welcome to The Adventures of Alex.