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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.'"
I learned a lot about European history from that game -- not just facts, but also the understanding that there used to be so much in the eastern half of Europe until the mongols and turks flattened it -- what we tend to think of as Europe now is really just the western 2/5 or so.
Darn those turks, with their fiendishly juicy kebabs!
Whence? Hence. Whither? Thither.
I have an OT question. Does Rob sit at the slashdot headquarters on Wednesday and say "It compiles... must be ok to push straight to production!" And then spend all day Thursday trying to fix all the mistakes that simple user testing would have found in a heartbeat? Do you have unit tests? Do you think the users enjoy playing tester Thursdays?
Seriously, there should be AT LEAST a development server, integration server, and staging server before hitting the production server. Its pathetic how unprofessional this 'popular' site is.
Now, to remain on topic, games like Civ3 and stuff teach history to a point, but specifics still need to be taught through books and lectures.
Good quote, too many chars. Seriously, the slashdot 120 char limit sucks!
this is utterly useless for history lessons. for math, where each problem has a definite solution, pre-determined format of learning like programmed game may work. (i'm skeptical, though. it always sounds like gimmick to me. nothing beats repeated work with pencil and paper...)
history, there is often no correct answer. even if it's as simple as identifying a person or a date of a historical event, the point is to understand the event in context of others and foster discussions, not to just be able to identify the date or a key figure. i don't see how pre-determined program like games can foster discussions. students will just obsess over getting the right answer and nothing else.
It looks to me like the game is merely setting up a historical event like "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." and then you're off to do whatever you want in that context. That's not really teaching history. What if simulated Chamberlain has some balls and doesn't sign the peace treaty with Germany or simulated Hitler keeps his treaty with Russia or soembody playing Roosevelt doesn't get involved in WWII? That's not what happened. That's really no different than C&C: Red Alert.
I just think that the amount of actual history picked up through this will be minimal to the time spent on it. Also, it might actually confuse students learning history because they might not differentiate the historical verion of what happened and the simulated version of what happened. Of course, that's just what I pick up from the article. The actual software might have already addressed these issues.
"History is a selective interpretation of events intended to justify those currently in power.
Memory is the same thing on an individual scale. "
One of my favorite quotes.
What I'd like to see is better history simulation. Get a program that can take certain factors and use it to predict the outcome. After all, knowing math means we can predict the answers to math problems. Shouldn't knowing history mean the same thing? And isn't any school of thought's actual value as a study linked to the predictive value it creates? Or we could just be cynics and say that history is only useful for indoctrination and persuasion....
___
It's the end of my comment as I know it and I feel fine.
I once knew an Englishman who was trying to create an accurate simulation of the Alamo siege. His theory was, he could sell this program to schools all over Texas and make a fortune. It sounded like a good idea. . . He just failed to reckon something: Texas schools have almost no interest in teaching history.
During my 12 years in grade school, we studied the Texas Revolution probably for a total of about 30 minutes. We never got any explanation of why it took place, and our coverage of The Alamo simply repeated the Hollywood myths.
We learned: The Alamo was one of only two battles in the history of the world (the other occurring in ancient Greece) where all the defenders fought to the death.
Historians say: A few defenders escaped during the confusion of the fight, and a few others were captured and later executed by the Mexicans.
We learned: Each Texan killed, on average, four or five Mexican soldiers before he fell.
Historians say: The death toll was probably roughly even on both sides. Santa Anna's army wasn't crippled by the battle.
We learned: The two weeks of time spent laying siege to the Alamo allowed Sam Houston to gather his troops and made ultimate victory possible.
Historians say: The Alamo had no strategic military importance.
My point is that if Texas schools were motivated to teach this story accurately, they certainly wouldn't have needed a computer program to do a better job than this. And the idea that they would spend money on it is fairly laughable.
However. . . If my British friend could have made a simulation program to teach football plays -- he probably could have sold a ton of them to Texas schools and be a millionaire by now. It's all a matter of priorities, you know.
Actually, the game wasn't that bad for an NES title, especially considering it was an unlicensed independant game. It had remarkably good graphics and decent gameplay. It was a decent collection of games, with characters from the Bible.
BTW, you didn't part the red sea, the level was about keeping baby moses safe as he crawled across snakepits and stuff - kind of a gyromite thing. IIRC, that is.
I don't know why people who claim to not be religious get so upset about religious themed stuff. I mean whats the difference between a bible story like Noah's Ark and another legend like Hercules, if you dont believe in either?
I don't need no instructions to know how to rock!!!!
It focuses more on trade, diplomacy, and research than on combat (there is plenty of combat, but it's relatively abstract). Also, it's focus on a particular time period (~1300 till 1800, if I remember correctly) means that it can be incredibly detailed and accurate. Many of the 'random' events are historical in nature, and tied to particular countries. Also the fact that you can play any of the more than 100 countries in the game (though many are doomed without lots of luck and skill) is pretty neat too.
Far and away the best game of its genre I've ever played. Difficult as hell, too.
He decided to just watch the government, and kind of scale it down to size, and run his life that way. --Laurie Anderson
I assume that you're saying that you left high school. Consider going back, no matter how bad your particular place may be. Your criticism of math games betrays a lack of maturity:
I'm sure most of us have used those lame maths games at some point. Personally, I didnt learn jack from them, not only were they uneducational, they sucked really bad. Crap graphics, crap sound, no storyline, etc.
Now, the last math games I used were rote-method arithmetic tutors on the Apple II back in elementary school, which were certainly not exciting (They were challenging). But if you think everything in the world is exciting at the start, you need to rethink what you've done. Math has a lot of uses, some of which you probably want to understand for more useful things: but math is hard, and boring, and requires the student to yoke himself to the task.
You also can't expect teachers to teach you; this is a two-way street. For instance, although the basic tenets of grammar and a wide vocabulary were *given* me in middle school, most other people I know who also received it have lost it. You can't place blame on teachers. In college, I've found this to be even more the case, as I am in classes with seventy-five or more people; even so, it is still entirely possible for me to have a personal experience with the professor -- if I make the effort.
Even Einstein couldn't have gotten his low-level job at the Swiss Patent Office without a high-school diploma. If he didn't have that job, he couldn't have supported himself well enough to have time to come up with the Special Theory of Relativity. Unless you have a really great business plan and a lot of money you can throw at it, go back to school and make the best of it until you graduate. If you're really too good for school, then prove it by winning at the system.
Why do I have a feeling that the Secret Service would frown on any company who sells games to schoolkids that teaches them to shoot leading American political figures?
Why do I also have a feeling that the most of the rest of the world would pitch in for said company's legal defense fund? *grin*
--
I Hit the Karma Cap, and All I Got Was This Lousy
From what I've seen homeschooling our kids, an interest or curiosity about history needs to come first if a kid (or anybody) is going to learn. The rote memorization of facts many of us suffered through doesn't work. In our case, my son was hooked on "The Magic Treehouse" books, in which a couple of kids transport through time in a treehouse and end up in the middle of important historical events. That, plus video games got him very interested in history, which made the teaching / learning bit very very easy.
It's no different than contuining education for adults. It's got to be relevant for somebody to be interested. "Those that fail to learn from history are doomed to repeat it" is not interesting to kids. Leaning more about westward expansion and what really happened with (Oregon) settlers is interesting to a kid if they have been enjoying the game (or books) already anyway.
Nobody bombed medical clinics (or Iraq or any number of other places) in the name of Hercules.
If the game creators were to use history as the back drop, and force the game play to match the pace of history then students could pick up a lot about history.
For example, maybe make a spy game (Thiefesque) were you work for whichever side and try to help them win. You could work for the colonials, and your job is to find out what ports the British plan to blockade, troop strength and movements, etc. Everything you find out during your "missions" of course is real data from real events in real history.
Another fun game might be an empire game (Civilization like) where you have to produce the weapons of war, get them to the field, and meet the objectives to win within the date parameters set for you. A set of scenarios could be developing, producing, delivering, loading, and then fighting with enough boats to storm Normandy on D-Day. Events of course would be dictated by the real timeline of history including must-do events like when the tech for landing boats became available and random events like how many uboats are out there impeding your shipment deliveries.
I can think of lots of ways history games could go because there so much interesting material to work with. History teaches that people do their best work when in conflict: That's why history books are full of Wars and modern society runs on capitalism.
If anyone wants to hire me to make fun games see my Journal. I would love to design fun games and could make someone a lot of money doing so!
This space for rent. Cheap.
I agree with you, which you probably noticed from my final comment about school boards controlling K-12 history curricula and about college intro history having to essentially "unteach" what's been done before they get there.
There are exceptions of course, but grade school and high school history in America often have little to do with teaching students to think critically about history and to ask difficult questions. History for kids is one of the most politicized subjects, if not the very most. School districts and parents argue that their kids should learn the nice, happy stories they were taught, which have nice morals to them and make us better people.
Of course, much of what you're reciting above is the same thing - essentialized stories, this time designed to refute the old stories. Any time history is about neat little stories, whether positive or negative, it's not getting anywhere. History as a field explores questions and is meant to be argumentative, not narrative. There are no neat, tidy answers that don't essentialize the problem to such an extent as to lose meaning.
Let me give a quick (shabby) example: most grade schools teach that the Civil War was about southern slaveholders who wanted to have slaves. The North protested, and the Northerners fought a holy war to free the slaves. Separately, the traditional southern story of the War Between the States teaches that Southerners were upset that a Federal government was telling them what to do. The war was about states' rights, not slavery. The northerners forced unfair government on the South.
Well, I could say that both of these stories are false, and I would be fairly accurate. However, it's not useful simply to say they are false. The point is, both stories have some elements of truth to them, but the problem is far more complex. Was slavery a central issue? Sure. Was States' rights a central issue? Yes. It also had a bit to do with how people interpreted the founding documents of the United States, and how they viewed the struggle that had been the American Revolution. It was tied up in the fact that the United States were expanding rapidly, and the new states had no stake in the original compromises that had brought about the Constitution. It had a lot to do with the death of an old political party (the Whigs) and the birth of a new one (the Republicans). The reality is, the war came about thanks to a whole lot of factors, and every individual involved had a different way of interpreting what it was about.
One of the interesting questions that emerges from this is, what caused individuals to view the Civil War the way they viewed it? How could two brothers, living in the same city with the same upbringing, come to opposite conclusions about the war and fight on opposite sides? What was at stake for these people, and why did they view the struggle as something worth dying for? How were these many and varied views and opinions united into armies, and how did those in power (journalists, politicians, etc) appeal to people about the war? What does this tell us about Modernity and the emergence of print culture in the middle of the 19th Century?
These are the types of questions that professional historians ask (though I'm a European historian, so I may be ten years out of date on what questions are hot right now on the American Civil War). These questions cannot be addressed by a video game, and they're rarely addressed by grade schools, high schools, or popular history in general.
I did not design this game/I did not name the stakes/I just happen to like apples/And I am not afraid of snakes-AniD
When a group of dudes with spears can take out a tank, your game needs some work.
Not nessecarily. The tank can defeat a large number of spearmen, but it's all a distant abstraction of combat. In reality, that tank would need to be refueled each day, while the primitive troops can go for weeks without eating. Tank's can't kill infantry effectively- they can break them out of fortifications and drive them into hiding, but that's all.
If the tanks are surrounded by hidden enemies, the risk of one of the critical crewmen being ambushed becomes unbeatable.
In real life, of course, tanks would beat spearmen because they'd always be supported by riflemen... but if you failed to do that in the game, then the loss is your own fault.
(Let's drop an M1-A2 into the Amazon jungle and count how many spearmen it takes to beat it...)
Shouldn't it also be possible to play the wife of the Czech factory worker caught up in the middle of it all?
Any sufficiently advanced libertarian utopia is indistinguishable from government.
...since so much of history is about the nuances of personality and sheer human perversity, since Computer games really don't convey that aspect very well.
I personally think boardgames - even something as simple as Diplomacy springs to mind - are far more useful in teaching the complexity of human interaction in international diplomacy, for instance.
I very much wish that everyone who wants to spout their opinion about modern statecraft be forced to play a high-stakes game of Empires in Arms all the way through, with multiple players on a side. Suddenly you'll understand why most states are inherently conservative in their decision making and slow to react to world events.
Although I've had intense political discussions in games like VGA Planets, or pretty much any slow-playing, massively multiplayer game.
-Styopa
1) The game rules don't necessarily reflect reality so much as the developer's concept of how things should work. Things that work in reality may not work in the game. Taxation is a good example. In reality, as the tax rate increases, people use more resources trying to comply at the lowest possible cost and so the amount of tax revenue doesn't grow as fast as one would like. In many games this is handled simplistically, with a higher rate giving you coorespondingly higher revenue. If there are any negative consequences, it is usually something like increased unrest rather than decreased production.
Similarly, reducing the tax rate in the real world tends to increase tax revenue because there is less incentive to hide your income in tax shelters, and the reduced cost of compliance, along with the reduced tax rate, tends to stimulate economic activity. In most games, this merely results in a decreased revenue.
2) Games which lets the player have incredible control over the country he runs distorts the reality behind politics and governments. In many games there is little real difference between how dictatorships and democracies are run. Some games may increase unrest in the democratic countries when the citizens are calculated to disagree with the present policy (or something like that), but otherwise the underlying assumption is that the head of state has complete control of the country. This is especially bad in games where the player decides what industry should be producing, and games where the player actually trades goods to other countries rather than, say, making high-level trade agreements with those countries.
I'm not saying that these games have no value in teaching history, but their simplistic rules (compared to reality), their political bias and the player's ability to control every aspect of the country would definitely need to be considered by the instructor.
Good thing I didn't use mod then eh?
One line blog. I hear that they're called Twitters now.
I learned (and still remember) more about history from all the historical fiction books I've read than I ever will from history classes.
Funny, back when I was studying history, I made a point to avoid reading historical fiction.
The problem is that unless the author has a really good grasp of the history in question and the ability to understand and overcome the prejudices of his own time, those modern prejudices inevitably will distort the history being related in the author's fiction.
Or more concisely, as an English professor once put it to our class, all fiction, regardless of its setting, is about (the issues of) its own time.
Let me make this more concrete with a thought experiment involving not history, but science fiction. You're probably not a vegan, and you probably don't consider meat-eaters to be morally flawed.
Now imagine that, two hundred years from now, everyone is a vegan vegetarian -- and that they grew up the children and grandchildren of vegans, the result of a bloody war begun in 2161 to abolish meat eating. Imagine further that although the vegetarians did win that war, for decades after the war, the resentful losing meat-eaters did their best to surreptitiously continue meat eating, until the vegetarians responded by becoming strict vegans and changing the culture by teaching the moral wrongness of meat eating or any sort of animal exploitation in all the schools.
So two hundred years from now, every school child is taught in elementary school the horrors of the farm and slaughterhouse, and about the valiant war that put an end to the holocausts that supplied the meat aisles of the grocery stores, and the bottom line, that meat eating was not a choice, not just an inefficient allocation of scarce resources, but a disgusting moral wrong.
Now that school child, when he thinks about life in 2004, will find it puzzling, at best, how the vast majority of Americans of our time could go to McDonald's and casually enjoy the results of the abuse, murder, and consumption of an innocent animal. Only the thoughtful children will even get to "puzzled"; most will simply dismiss us as brutes and barbarians.
And the historical novelist of two hundred years from now, who will himself be a confirmed vegan, will write books that, consciously or not, incorporate his moral belief that exploiting animals is wrong, and will tend to cast his sympathetic characters as vegans, or at least as holding vegan attributes, or anachronistically treating their pets as co-equal "animal companions", all out of proportion to the actual number of strict vegans in the real america of 2004.
Just substitute "abolitionist" for "vegetarian" and "Civil Rights supporter" for vegan" in the above, and you'll have an understanding of how difficult it is to write honest historical novels about slavery and racism in America in 1804. In 1804, slavery was considered by some to be a moral wrong (just as some today are vegans), but the vast majority saw it as a political problem or even as a natural way of life endorsed by the Bible. Even of those who in 1804 were against slavery ("vegetarians"), only a very very few believed in racial equality ("vegans"); perhaps the closest they came were proposals to forcibly send ex-slaves back to Africa.
Even those who were ardent supporters of slavery were not necessarily judged to be immoral men for it, unless they seemed to take unnecessary pleasure in being cruel to their slaves; and many slave owners were -- and are -- considered to be great mean -- among them George Washington and Thomas Jefferson.
But since the Civil War and the messy, inconclusive aftermath that was Reconstruction and the Jim Crow Era, Americans have made racism -- and by extension, slavery -- into a moral issue that transcends all others. Nowadays, nearly the worst thing you can accuse a public figure of is racism -- only sex crimes against children are more inflammatory.
The result is that mo
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