History-Themed Games in History Education: Experiences on a Blended World History Course

TL;DR

This paper explores integrating strategy video games into a blended world history course to enhance students' understanding of historical contexts, based on four years of experiments and student assessments.

Contribution

It introduces a novel blended course design combining traditional teaching with historical video games and evaluates its impact on student learning.

Findings

Students showed improved understanding of historical contexts.

Video games increased engagement and motivation.

Course design can be adapted for various historical topics.

Abstract

In this paper we explain our experiences and observations on a blended world history course which combines classical lecture and discussion elements as well as video game sessions in which the students play strategy video games with heavy historical focus. The course, named Playing with The Past, is designed to experiment on how to integrate video games on teaching history especially in order to achieve a higher understanding of the contemporary social, political, economical, and technological context of a given era for a given nation. We ran the course four times between 2015 - 2018 with different video game titles having different historical models and observe the experiences and learning of students based on the quality of their written essays and articles. 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.