Inform 7

From nswccWiki

Do I want to be Inform-ed?

There is an wonderful, freely available application called Inform 7. This would have to be one of the most interesting and useful applications ever written for education. It is nothing less than an environment for writing interactive fiction in English (well, structured English) but it has tremendous potential:

• teachers can construct "environments for students to explore".
• the environments can be based on fact or fiction.
• gaming and role play are central to the whole process
• the environments could be structured learning environments
• students (explorers) can modify what happens
• it is based on linguistic research rather than computer science research
• it is extensible.. you can add to its knowledgebase
• it has the ability to know about the time of day, time intervals and measurement.

Sound too good to be true.. well you do need to learn something of how it works. However, for the Mac platform there is an excellent Integrated Development Environment.