History Games Go to School: Research Insights From the American History and Civics Initiative

Bill Tally · Cynthia Char · James Diamond · Cassidy Puckett · Jeff Sun

Fri., June 12, 11:00–12:30, Inn Wisconsin (2nd floor, East/Southeast)

In 2007–8, the Corporation for Public Broadcasting’s American History and Civics Initiative (AHCI) funded seven interdisciplinary teams across the country to design, test, and create, in a 1 year period, prototype digital games and multimedia platforms that would improve middle and high school students’ knowledge in American history and civics.

Each AHCI team consisted of curriculum and game developers, historians, artists, programmers, and classroom teachers, and gave a prominent role to researchers who tracked students’ history learning through formative measures and classroom field tests.

This symposium brings together researchers from four of the seven AHCI teams, along with the project’s “meta-evaluator”, in a rare opportunity to discuss three key questions that have emerged from the research:

• How do digital game designs enable cultures of participation for ‘doing history’?
• As students and teachers participate in them, what aspects of these cultures support and encourage historical thinking skills, habits, and knowledge? What aspects hinder disciplinary learning?
• What do tangible learning outcomes look like in these cultures, as measured by the ACHI evaluators? How close, and how far, are they from what school people recognize and value as metrics of learning?

Our format will include brief intros to each of the four games, but will focus on research findings about history learning and game design, and invite early and active audience participation. The four ACHI projects included in the panel are:

American Dynasties

American Dynasties is a 3D role–playing history game for middle school students. Players take on the roles of urban Americans in the 1890s, such as factory manager, factory worker, or cottage–industry worker. The educational objectives include learning about daily life in the 1890s, the development of understanding of historical issues (e.g., immigration, labor history, etc.), and work with primary sources.

Flashback

Flashback is a combination online “race–mission” game and national television broadcast. It asks participants (of an indeterminate grade level) to compete in a backwards race in time by solving an online series of curriculum–based missions. Contestants are gathered to compete in real–time, “American Idol–like” competitions with celebrity judges, televised nationally.

Mission America: Crown versus Colony?

Mission America is an online adventure and role–playing game in which students take on the role and perspective of characters throughout American history — in the pilot, during the early stages of the American Revolution. In order to successfully complete the game, players must dialogue with real and fictional figures, analyze sources, find their way through the Boston Massacre, and make a variety of inferences and decisions all rooted in a developing historical understanding.

Young American Heroes

Young American Heroes is a suite of digital storytelling tools and games designed to help middle school–aged students learn about the lives and times of famous and ordinary Americans when young (Frederick Douglass and mid–19th century slavery are the focus of the pilot). Students research, create, publish, rate, and comment on one another’s stories online, using criteria for good historical storytelling in a range of media — graphic novel, video, and print.