The best classroom questions start with "what would you have done?" — and then one hand goes up, one student answers, and twenty-nine spectate. A branching decision scenario asks the same question of every student at once and makes each of them commit before the discussion starts. History becomes a chair you sit in, ethics dilemmas grow consequences, literature gets played from inside a character’s head.
ScenarioSplice was built for this kind of lesson: you assemble a decision tree visually, tag outcomes for color-coded feedback, and hand the class a link. Students play on Chromebooks or phones with no accounts and no sign-in — nothing to provision, and no student data collected.
Philadelphia, 1793. Yellow fever is spreading and students advise the mayor: quarantine the docks and strangle the port economy, urge evacuation, or trust the physicians recommending bleed-and-purge cures. Branches follow each policy through September, and info pages carry what actually happened — the scenario teaches historical thinking, not a single right answer.
The group chat. A middle-school digital citizenship dilemma: an embarrassing screenshot of a classmate is spreading, and it lands on the student’s phone. Forward it, ignore it, reply to defuse it, or tell an adult — each branch plays out the week that follows for everyone involved.
Inside the novel. Before discussing a pivotal chapter, students play a minor character facing that chapter’s central choice — loyalty or honesty, flight or witness. When they meet the author’s version afterward, they have already argued with it from the inside. (If your class is authoring full interactive fiction rather than decision lessons, our sibling app StorySplice is the same engine tuned for creative writing.)
When students choose privately before discussing publicly, three things improve. Participation: every student decided, not just the fast hands. Honesty: anonymous play means the unpopular option actually gets chosen, which makes the debrief real. And stakes: a student who watched their decision play out badly argues its weaknesses with a conviction no lecture produces. The scenario is the ante for the discussion, not a replacement for it.
Scenarios run five to fifteen minutes and play on anything with a browser — Chromebooks, tablets, phones. Assign by pasting the link into Google Classroom, Canvas, Schoology, or onto the board at the front of the room. Students never create accounts and no student name, email, or account is collected, which keeps the privacy conversation short. Feedback tags color-code outcomes for younger learners, and private facilitator notes hold your discussion questions right where you will want them. Building and sharing is free — the build guide takes about ten minutes to read.
Learners never sign in, and no student account, name, or email is collected — students open a link and play. Review your district’s policies as you would for any tool, but by design there is no student data to worry about.
Yes — building the tree is often the richer assignment. Authors sign in with Google, so student authors need Google accounts (a school Google Workspace login works).
Anywhere a decision matters and the right answer is not obvious: history what-ifs, ethics and civics, literature perspective-taking, health decisions, world-language dialogues with register choices.
Yes. Run it on the projector as a whole-class vote, or in pairs on shared devices — it is just a link, so it does not care.