The possibilities of making games to improve history education are next to endless. Strategy, simulations of events and to explore connections between different events or ages, is only some of the ways to empowering history education digitally to activate the learner. Mehmet Şükrü Kuran, Ahmet Erdem Tozoğlu, Cinzia Tavernari at Abdullah Gul University in Turkey is pioneering this form of learning. As they have developed an undergraduate history course in which students use historical computer games.
Empowering history education
The focus of the game has been to boost understanding and the discussion about history among the students. The game covers three different ages, Middle Age, the Industrial Revolution and World War I-II. The students have specific goals to accomplish within the game and then the task is also to write about the experience. In a recently published paper about the method the team writes:
“Our experiments and observations could be beneficial not only for the design of a general world history course, but also for a history course on specific periods, cultures, and nations.”
Source: MIT Technology Review
Written by
LarsGoran Bostrom©
Author of the book “Learning Design in Practice for Everybody” and the founder of eLearningworld Europe AB. And also the developer of SOE (Storyteller on eLearningworld) – a new platform for integrated storytelling in interactive books, soon with augmented reality features.