Bring Games into the Classroom.
As we have begun to develop games that can function as classroom resources, we have tried to build on these insights. Consider, for example, Revolution, a game we are developing for use in high school and middle school U.W. history classes. In Revolution, students assume the roles of townsfolk in Colonial Williamsburg, Virginia, as they go about their business and make political decisions on the eve of the American Revolution. Most of the major incidents and characters in the game are drawn from news reports in the Virginia Gazette, the major newspaper in Williamsburg in the 1770s. Students can read stories from the paper in preparation for playing the game. After they play, they can read further accounts to see how the actual community responded to the historic situations, or they can write their own news reports to describe how the events played out within the game. The game thus provides a solid context for students to learn from primary source materials, a skill emphasized by many state social studies standards. At the same time, each student has a distinctive experience, seeing the events through the eyes of a character of a specific class, race, gender, and political identity and making choices that affect the outcome of events. Playing these individual roles encourages students to participate in class discussions and thus provides an incentive to learn core vocabulary to share their perspectives.
But teachers do not need to use games specifically designed for education to tap the learning potential of games in their classroom teaching. Kurt Squire, codeveloper of Revolution and one of the codirectors of the Education Arcade, has introduced Civilization Ⅲ into high school geography and history classes with positive results. Civilization Ⅲis a commercially developed strategy game in which players shape the growth and development of a historical civilization, negotiating trade agreements or plunging the civilization into war. Squire has found that playing this game helps students develop a strong conceptual framework for understanding the logic of historical change ---- for example, thinking about the role of resources or geographic location in determining the rate at which civilizations develop. Students also use a broad array of vocabulary often included on standardized social studies tests ----from monarchy to monotheism ----as they analyze and articulate their game-play experience (Squire, 2004)
In both of these examples, the game serves as part of a larger education trajectory. Social studies teachers have long used role-playing to help students understand global politics or historical events from different perspectives for example, the Model United Nations is essentially a role-playing game that teachers use as a catalyst to get students excited about understanding multinational politics. Students don誸 just show up and participate in the Model United Nations assembly; they spend weeks preparing, doing library research, listening to relevant lectures, and reading textbooks. Ideally, the role-play leads to other learning activities, such as written assignments, class discussions, and oral presentations.
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