Sunday 30 November 2014

Games and Education

Recently in a few of our classes we have been reviewing online exhibits and games for their utility as historical or educational tools. Many games already use history as their base although these are usually solely for entertainment. They are not meant for educational purposes but could have the by-product of introducing players to new subjects, and getting them interested in history. This includes games like Assassin’s Creed, a game that has won awards for its historical details. Another example would be Victoria, a resource management game set in the Victorian age, in which players steer a country through the 19th century. (Full disclosure: I’ve never played either of these games but they sound interesting. I may check them out when I’m not in the middle of school.)

 Given the popularity of these games, more and more people are looking at games as a way of teaching historical skills or events. Making a game for educational purposes is different then making one for entertainment. A guest speaker in our class, Robert MacDougall, discussed how no matter what the background for a game is; it’s the core activity the players learn. So for entertainment games, people may pick up some historical information, but they’ll really be learning the mechanics of the game. So, to make a game educational, the developers have to make the mechanics of the game into what they want the players to learn. MacDougall did this with his pervasive alternate reality game, Tecumseh Lies Here. ARGs are played on and offline and usually take the form of large scavenger hunts. The game was based around the War of 1812, focusing on the controversy around the burial place of Tecumseh, a Shawnee chief who had a large role in the war. The game was designed to mimic historical research in order to teach historical research skills.

The game the last part of this blog will review is more of an app then a game. It is also meant for entertainment rather than education. Slate’s Interactive Game of Death is a spinner that lets you pick a different year from 1647 to 1990 (although mostly in the 19th century) to discover what your cause of death would be in each year. The mortality statistics are drawn from a different source for each year in the timeline. The sources include private casualty records, church records, bills of mortality, and Centre of Disease Control historical data from both the UK and Boston. The player can press the spinner as many times as they like, and it will display a likely cause of death for each spin depending on the statistics found in the sources. The purpose of the game is to describe how the nature of death has changed over time as our knowledge of medicine and health has changed. The spinner clearly shows how longer-term diseases such as cancer and heart disease took over as infectious diseases died out.

As an educational tool, it’s not that useful. There’s a short blurb preceding the spinner that serves to contextualize the tool, but it doesn’t have as much background material as other historical sites. For example, there are no definitions for some of the more obscure diseases, which would be helpful for further info. There are a few links to outside sources that could add information if people were interested, but they would have to leave the site to get it. Also, if the core activity is what the player learns, then really all you’re learning is how to press a button. However, as an entertaining app, which is really what it’s meant for, it’s great. It’s fun to bounce around the timeline and see what causes of death pop up at each year. The player can see all the different names for diseases that may or not exist anymore, as well as the changes in causes of death over time. Overall, the spinner is a fun little app that can waste a few minutes, with the benefit of perhaps interesting viewers enough to research different diseases and begin to understand how diseases have changed over time. Even if it’s not completely educational, that’s a pretty good result.

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