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Teaching History In Schools With Video Games
Joe writes "There's a story about a Massachusetts company, Muzzy Lane Software, creating a Civ-style simulation computer game to teach history to high school and college students. 'Our view isn't that you take the right video game, stick it in a classroom and everything gets better,' Mr. McCool said. 'But with the right tools, this can significantly enhance learning.'"
By CHRIS LARSON
.muzzylane.com.
Published: May 27, 2004
Massachusetts Institute of Technology
IT'S the 1930's, and you have just been elected president of France on a promise to rebuild the French economy. But you learn that Germany is rapidly building its army, and your advisers are urging you to do the same. What will happen if you break your campaign pledge and divert resources and attention to building up the French military?
Or you're the British prime minister in 1938. Diplomats in Munich have reached a deal: Germany will be allowed to annex the Sudetenland if it promises that its expansion will go no further. What will the consequences be if you refuse to sign the agreement?
History is filled with such what-ifs, and a company called Muzzy Lane Software thinks they could help high school and college students learn about history and develop thinking skills. To that end, Muzzy Lane is getting ready to introduce schools to a technology that is already familiar to most of today's students: a video game, but one that is custom-designed for the classroom.
Making History is a multiplayer simulation that puts players in control of European governments before, during and after World War II. With a price tag somewhere between $25 and $40, the game is expected to be available in the fall from www
Computer games have been used in education for years, especially at the elementary level, where there are thousands of software titles. At the high school and college level, though, strategy games are generally limited to stock market and election simulations, experts and teachers say. Muzzy Lane aims to change that.
The challenge is to "integrate the learning without preaching to the player," said Dave McCool, the president of Muzzy Lane. "You want to create an environment where they're learning."
The game's designers took elements of entertainment simulations - the graphics, the realistic cause-and-effect, the variety of challenges - and adapted them for classroom use by making the game customizable for different learning levels, breaking it into timed sessions and adding a variety of supporting material for instructors.
Making History starts in the 1930's. Students take on the roles of various European leaders, making decisions on taxes and spending, trade policy, international treaties and military action. The simulation engine calculates the effects of each player's actions and moves the game forward, sometimes with results that differ strikingly from actual events.
Muzzy Lane's designers expect players to rely on their knowledge of history; the game is meant to help them add to it by delving deeper into their history textbooks or Web sites to improve their performance.
Making History is also intended to encourage problem-solving and the understanding of cause and effect. Such skills "are difficult to teach in a textbook-and-lecture format," said Nick deKanter, vice president of Muzzy Lane. He said that a 2002 study from the Woodrow Wilson International Center for Scholars found that video game playing "builds on basic instincts for competition, interaction and imagination that are instinctive in so many people." The study recommended "combining these elements with instructive materials, or wrapping important content in a gaming package."
Some teachers have used popular games like SimCity and Civilization in classes, but education specialists say that such programs, while useful, ultimately fall short. "They're good games, but they're inherently weak on education," said Eric Klopfer, an assistant professor of science, education and educational technology at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology. "They can be harnessed for education, but they weren't designed from the ground up for education."
One of the biggest drawbacks is the games' lack of support materials to back up the content of the games. Making History will include comparisons to actual events, contextual commentaries and links to other history sources. The educational value of the game action increases when there is time to review and discuss what took place, Mr. McCool said. "We strongly believe that simulations require a good debriefing period."
I really miss playing Oregon Trail on the apple II we had in our classroom.
So get an emulator, that's what I did.
It is amazing playing all the neat games I played as a kid, only now I get 16 colors instead of just 3.
Personally I recommend AppleWin for those using evil err Windows OS. I'm sure there are emulators out there for Linux, but I've been too lazy thus far to find and install them.
After you have an emulator all you need is a ROM for Oregon Trail and then have lots of fun contributing to the total extermination of the Buffalo, Deer, and small rodents across our great nation.
Howdy Doodly Doo!
Anybody want some Toast?
The game used is called Europa Universalis 2 and is something which has consumed hundreds of hours of my playing time over the last couple of years.
It's a strategy game that uses historical events to shape the course of the game. The game has military, economy, diplomacy, colonization and religious aspects to it. There are also hundreds of available countries to play with and the game is very moddable through text file editing.
Also, the game was developped in english which makes it available for a wide audience.
http://www.paradoxplaza.com/news.asp?ArticleID=15This would be nothing, though, if Flashman weren't fun. He is everything that the Victorians stood against: a drunkard, womanizer, liar, coward, and scoundrel (the books take the form of deathbed confessions, with him setting the record straight to spite his prudish children and relatives). It's delightful fun to see him get the better of sacred institutions of proper society in one chapter and two chapters later see him about to be tortured to death by some horrid villain. Why? Because the bastard has it coming, of course! Even the footnotes are tonuge in cheek, criticizing Flashman's cowardice and bad memory even as the plot is being built upon those flaws.
Flashman is a great antihero. If you have a chance, wander by your local library and give him a whirl. You'll be happy you did.
"Prepare for the worst - hope for the best."
Both of those games are made by Paradox and are by far the most evolved historical games I've ever seen. Way beyond Civilization.
The EU2 "Grand Campaign", which covers world history from 1419 to 1820, has something like 200 nations in it and tens of thousands of historical events firing.
Sure, the game can quickly become anachronistic especially if you are a good player focusing on extending your empire, but it still strikes an excellent balance between simulating history and playability. I particularly like the way wars of religions are handled, and the crucial concept of national stability and of the necessity for a Casus Belly to declare war if you do not want to suffer from a drop in stability.
Those two games are the only one I would consider for teaching historical facts (and not simply getting students interested).
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Gupta, fsck off and go spew your false info somewhere else.
Anyone who doesn't know this guy yet, read his post history, or check here. Known troll who always falsely claims to be working at Nintendo, Sega, etc.
English is a horrible repeat of writing papers every year. My first year in college was exactly the same. I never learned anything new and my paper writing skills never increased after probably 9th grade.
Learning isn't something that just happens, you know. Skills don't increase on their own just by going to class. You have to take responsibility for that. Don't blame your teachers because your writing skills didn't increase. If you were writing well enough, in 9th grade, to get A's in every English course up through freshman level in college, that's great. But that doesn't mean there's no room for improvement. You could have participated in essay writing contests, challenging yourself, improving your skills, all while giving yourself the chance to win prizes and/or scholarships. Or, at the very least, taken the AP tests (even if your school didn't offer the class, you can still take the tests, and if your writing and reading comprehension were good enough that college freshman English wasn't a problem, you probably would have done well on the AP tests)
As for history, it's a pity your school focused on the easy to test date memorization rather than the harder to test, but more important, understanding the reason why those dates were important, and what led up to those events in history. But again, don't blame your teachers because you didn't learn much. That big history book almost certainly had more information than just dates that you could have read yourself, and if not, there are dozens more books to be found in your local library or bookstore. Perhaps you'll never be a king or president, but history is important nonetheless. Learning how the world came to be what it is today helps you to understand politics, which effects you even if you choose to ignore it. It also will help you to understand other cultures. You will almost certainly, at some point in your life, meet someone from another culture, and understanding a bit about that culture might just be helpful to you when that happens.
Certainly, hands on experience is useful. But, if you want to do more with your life than simply reboot the server when it crashes, books should not be overlooked.
You're not talking about Africa, I'd guess. Most of the nations in Africa have low GNPs anyway, and they're not exactly trying to exert their influence around the world. They're trying to fight AIDS and keep their people fed.
You're not talking about Australia, as they're involved in the Iraq operation and had a military budget of $7.6 billion for 2003-2004.
You're not talking about Asia, as Russia, China and Japan alone had a combined military budget of $154.6 billion.
You're not talking about South America, as Brazil and Argentina alone spent a combined $11 billion on their militaries.
You're obviously not referring to North America, as the US alone spent $399.1 billion dollars last year and is continuing to spend billions more this year.
Maybe you're referring to Europe. Nope, that can't be right. After all, the military budgets of the top four European spenders (Russia not included) add up to $112.2 billion. That's certainly nothing like 0% of GNP. But maybe you were referring to the fact that European forces are never actually fielded in real-world operations.
Wait a minute. They actually ARE fielded in real-world operations. There are German troops in Afghanistan, and Norwegian troops in Afghanistan. There are British troops dying in Iraq and Afghanistan. There are Italian, Portugese, Polish, Ukranian, Dutch, Romanian, Danish, and other European soldiers in Iraq.
Their numbers pale in comparison to the number of American troops, but one wonders if the numbers would be higher had the Bush administration not bullied its allies into acquiescence on Iraq, rather than building a strong coalition the way the first Bush administration did. Perhaps the presence of forces from Germany and France, the most militarily powerful and politically influential of the continental nations, would have changed the overall calculus of the war.
But to say that Europeans are seeking diplomatic relevance without putting forth the force to back it up ignores the fact that many European nations are fielding units in Iraq and Afghanistan, and that many more might have been engaged had it not been for the brain-dead approach taken by the Bush administration.
All budget figures from the Center for Defense Information.
Read the EFF's Fair Use FAQ
Be careful of the Magic Treehouse books. My daughter enjoys them, too, and I enjoy reading them to her, but, for example, the one purportedly about ancient Hawaii was basically made up from whole cloth. It was as if the author's research consisted of watching a half-hour infomercial on Hawaiian vacations, and only paying attention to about half of it. I had to stop about halfway through and say "Look, none of this is right, I can't go on reading this book." It made me wonder about the rest of the series.
MT is okay if you can supplement it with real books on their topics. Which, I guess, just ends up being exactly the same point you make...if you don't have the interest in the subject to say "Wow, I wonder if that was right or not," then you're not going to get anywhere.
Gold Rush, from Sierra, was a great game where you played a guy leaving his home in Brooklyn to go to California for the gold-rush in 1848. It was a great game that taught about lots of things in 1848.
The game was not totally historically accurate, however it is the type of game where you still learn a lot and the inaccuracies can be easily explained. For example, in the game its your brother who discovers the gold; at the end of the game you and your brother strike it rich. In real life the man who is credited with discovering gold didn't find a second piece of gold. This kind of inaccuracy doesn't take away from learning about how people lived in the 1840s, or how they travelled west.
The major drawback of this game is that, like any other Sierra quest game, it takes hours to beat and the puzzles are usually not obvious. Good historical knowledge doesn't necessarily help you advance in the game. However, these deficiencies can be addressed if the game was re-done with "history-lesson" in mind. Student activities could include writing about how the game deviates from reality, and why they think that is.
However, I think that using games, even one as good as Gold Rush was, as an educational tool is inappropriate in most circumstances. Once in a while, it may be worthwhile, and games that educate as well as entertain are certainly good for a student's spare time, but I think a teacher should be able to keep children engaged in a history lesson without making them play games all day.
I worked at MIT last summer in the Games to Teach project. Several games were in development, one of which was Civ III mod that made it more historically accurate. Unfortunately, that never was able to be created due to funding problems (Microsoft ditched us - slashdot bashing anticipated). Also of note was the beginnings of Revolution (briefly mentioned in the article). I am unaware about its current state, but at the point I left, it was to be a total conversion of Neverwinter Nights.
Most of the games were targeted at a middle school level, where the amount of detail in lessons is normally quite low. In this case, the games would be quite useful. For example, a Civilization style game could help provide an overview of events over a wide period of time, while holding the students attention. Other types of games could be used for more in-depth studies. Revolution, for example, had each student play as a person living in a town in the late 1700s. They would experience scripted events based on the actual causes of the revolutionary war. (this may have changed since last summer)
"BTW, I was under the impression that George W. Bush and his cabinet, in collaboration with the Congress and Senate made and perpetuated these war aims against Iraq and Al Qeada. Since when did Christians have the final say in whether or not the US goes to war?"
ha.. well, you do realize that George W. Bush and his cabinet are largely Christian, don't you? That he mentions God at any/every opportunity, especially when justifying his actions?
The Congress even mentions God constantly. They are fighting to keep "under God" in the pledge of allegiance. You're fooloing yourself if you think this war is anything but a Christian vs. Arab situation.