Games and Historical Thinking
Thanks Karen Schrier for this guest post. Karen is a member of the LEEF advisory committee. She is an executive producer at Scholastic and a part-time doctoral student at Columbia University in games and learning. Her co-edited volume, Ethics and Game Design: Teaching Values through Play, just came out this month.
Can we use games and other media to teach historical thinking? A few years ago, a multidisciplinary team set out to develop a game for Corporation for Public Broadcasting’s “American History and Civics Initiative.” The team, led by Thirteen/WNET New York, includes WNET producers, historians from the American Social History Project at CUNY, game developers from Electric Funstuff, researchers from the Center for Children and Technology of the Education Development Center, and middle school history teachers.
We came up with “Mission U.S.: For Crown or Colony?” an adventure game for middle school-aged students. This game introduces them to the historical events, personalities, and socio-cultural structures in colonial Boston during the years leading to the American Revolution. The game is the first of a proposed series of six online games that will address key periods in American history.
In Mission U.S., students navigate historic settings, develop relationships with key figures, investigate primary documents, witness pivotal events, and ultimately decide their fate in the face of history. Students play as the character Nathaniel, a printer’s
apprentice, who needs to complete special tasks that lead him to interact with historic figures such as Paul Revere, and to befriend other townspeople, who over time reveal their loyalist or patriot leanings. A key part of the game is experiencing the Boston Massacre from a unique perspective, and then deliberating with other classmates about their varied interpretations of the event.
Pedagogical support for this type of game includes the following:
- Situated Learning – Games can provide relevant and authentic contexts for practicing history
- Motivation – Games can be a motivating and engaging environment for learning new ideas
- Identity formation – The main character or avatar can enable the game player to explore new perspectives and identities
- Collaboration – The game can support collaborative learning and whole class deliberation
- Vocabulary – The game can contextualize historical terms and enable vocabulary acquisition.
In our test classrooms, we found that students did apply historical thinking skills, and importantly, began to see history as something that is narrated and culled, rather than as a fact. They started putting themselves in the 1770 shoes of the Boston people, and see moments such as the Boston Massacre from multiple perspectives.
Teachers who used the game in their classroom will be speaking at Thirteen’s Celebration of Teaching and Learning this weekend. For more information about the panel, click here.
You can also learn about projects like this at LEEF 2010 where case studies will address overcoming the obstacles to implementing games, simulations and virtual worlds for learning. Visit www.leef2010.net for more information and to register.
This is an interesting topic for me as an American History teacher. I would love to be able to access high quality, standards based games for my classroom from one site. History is uniquely suited for the use of games in the classroom because of the reasons you listed above. Sites like Discovery Learning and Safari Montage has made it easy for teachers to access high quality, instructional videos and other media. Why isn’t there a compatible site for games?
This is a good question–as there are many teachers who would like to use games in the classroom, but there is no one-stop site that provides games for learning that are also tied to standards. I think part of the problem is that the use of games in the classroom has not been accepted. Another problem is the idea of standards, and the compatibility between what games can teach, and the standards that are developed by policymakers. For example, what do we do with games that support creativity or collaboration? Finally, I think people are still trying to figure out an appropriate business model for developing and selling games for curricular purposes.
That said, there are many sites that have games or game-like experiences that could be in the classroom, such as Scholastic.com (where I work). Or, for example, the Games for Change site has links to games for various types of social issues. Does anyone know if there is a one-stop shop that directs teachers to appropriate games resources?