Video games are an excellent tool for the classroom, as long as they are used in the right way. What I learned from the History through Gaming course is that video games, despite sounding like the perfect way to get kids or students interested in learning about history, do no apply to every situation and cannot be used on their own.
The game experience which I enjoyed most over the course of the semester was definitely Assassins Creed. I though that as far as emersion in history goes no other game that we played was able to bring history to life the same way. The turn based or strategy-based games that we played have never really been my favorite type of game, I’ve never sought one before the class. To me these games really felt more like textbook learning, every once in a while it was my turn to do something, and a fact would appear at the bottom of the page about my next decision. It could be that I’m just impatient, however I thought this sort of game was not as useful for the classroom, or at least not exciting. There were certainly some strengths to the strategy games that we played, and I felt that as far as learning more actual facts or details about history, they probably have better applications for that than foes a story-based game such as Assassin’s creed.
The independent presentation about Medal of Honor Airborne was probably my favorite assignment that I got all year from any class. The ability to really spend some time with a game that I hadn’t even thought about in maybe ten years was very fun, but also the ability to look at the game in the mindset of how it could be used in the classroom was enjoyable as well. I’m not an education major, however I am definitely looking at careers in the field of public history and I tho0ught this project was very useful for this. Although I only put together a short presentation on the game, I thought that I learned a lot about what to look for in a public history source as well, as well as how to translate that for my presentation.
The project where we created our own game, I enjoyed as well. Everyday that the History through Gaming class met I would have my Public History class a few hours before where I was also designing and creating historically themed board games. The game that we designed around the French revolution I thought was a fun project. Similar to me, my group I don’t believe was made up of mostly education majors so focusing on getting the game into a children’s aged classroom was not necessarily the top of our priorities], however I think we did a good job at making sure that our game was historically accurate.
Overall I very much enjoyed my experience in the class and feel as though I learned a lot. I feel as though I learned a lot about the different ways to portray history and found what I thought were some very easy ways to stimulate interest in history. I also feel after the last project, that the idea of using of video games in the classroom isn’t being used enough. After the last project, where we all designed our own games, the idea of video games in the classroom felt more like a sandbox and less like finding the right game to fit a curriculum. I’m well aware that designing a video game takes a lot of time however if it were easier and maybe more time and energy wads put into video games to make them more educational and less entertainment, there is certainly a large and very potentially successful mean for education.
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