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Tutorial builder tips: Start with a plan

Edited

You may find tutorial writing an interesting new challenge: Successful tutorials often involve planning ahead and several rounds of revision. Before you begin writing your own tutorial, consider a few questions:

What does the complete project look like? You can use your complete project as a "Sample," playable demonstration project, so that your readers know what goal they’re working towards and what kind of game or story they might be creating.

How much do you want to ask the readers to do? You might have your students start with a mostly empty project, or you could just have them add a single feature, like a scoreboard or user controls to an existing game or story.

How open-ended is the project? Do you want your students to recreate your project step-by-step, or is there room for them to create something different?

Reminder: Here's some info on the Tutorial Builder Basics .

Here's one way to organize your tutorial writing process:

  • Create your complete project, add any final bug fixes or polish, and Save it.

  • Open your completed project from My Projects, then click the Create Tutorial button and choose "Create a tutorial based on this project".

  • If you select this option, your original, complete Tynker project will be unchanged and remain available as a separate Tynker project from the newly created tutorial.

  • Write the tutorial using the copied project as the starting point. Your finished project will automatically be added to the first page of your tutorial as the Sample Project.

  • Finally, remove any code or actors you want to ask the reader to complete independently, creating the "starter project" you want students to work from.

You may also wish to save a backup version of your project before beginning writing a tutorial. It's a good idea to save a few different versions, incrementally, as you work on anything, so you can roll back to safe versions.

Choose Save As from the File menu to save a new version, then give your project a new name and it will appear as a new project in My Projects.