ROM Inuit Adventure

In 2017, the Royal Ontario Museum was preparing to launch Hack The ROM, a bi-annual new game development program for Ontario classrooms that taught kids how to make video games based on Indigenous culture over 5 months. I co-designed and co-founded the program as one of Makerspace Educators assigned to execute and build a game development curriculum for the program alongside Indigenous educators. While the program was initially based around the program Scratch, I pitched also teaching Twine as an alternative. Because my managers were skeptical of this, I performed extensive research on the Indigenous Inuit peoples through the ROM's resources and created this short Twine game as an example. My managers were so impressed by this that I was allowed to add Twine to our curriculum before the program launched in 2017 and and it became just as popular as Scratch in the classroom.

From 2017 - 2022, this Inuit-inspired game was used as a Twine demonstration as part of our curriculum to teach over 1000+ young students how to make Indigenous-inspired story video games at nearly 50 schools across Ontario. This game, alongside a dramatically voiced presentation I would perform of this game's story for the class, inspired the wide adoption of Twine by students to learn code and make their Indigenous-inspired games every year, as seen on the Hack The ROM Itch Account.