Honors Class at WIU Introduces Video Game Technology to the History Classroom

Honors Class at WIU Introduces Online video Match Technologies to the Background Classroom

January 27, 2023

MACOMB, IL – A new heritage program, offered by Western Illinois University’s Centennial Honors College, is having pupils concerned in the University’s new Digital Recreation Center, and incorporating setting up and actively playing historically-centered movie video games into classroom lessons.

WIU Division of History Chair Tim Roberts created and teaches the course, “Gaming the Past: Utilizing Video clip Video games to Educate and Make Background.” He hopes the course will reflect how electronic know-how is shaping the humanities at WIU. Thirteen Honors pupils are enrolled in the class having said that, none of them are heritage majors.

“I realized I experienced to up my recreation simply because I can not presume these college students like heritage,” explained Roberts. “I have to prove learning the past should really subject to digital natives.”

Assignments for the class can be finished on students’ personal units, or in the University’s Digital Recreation Center, which opened in Tumble 2021. The area, thought of the biggest eSports facility in the Midwest, provides a selection of technological selections for college students from computing to video clip gaming to digital reality units.

Throughout the course, students will be analyzing a wide variety of historic online video games that will need them to investigation common historical sources and occasions. A single activity asks students to part enjoy a character in a reenactment of a historical demo and to use traditionally-precise arguments to take part.

“I’m hoping to explode the notion that record is inescapable,” said Roberts. “Interactive, record-dependent games provide novel techniques to check out fundamental historic concepts: lead to-and-influence, bias, contingency and human company.”

College students ended up taken to the Digital Recreation Heart for an orientation session on the obtainable technological innovation.

Roberts turned fascinated in incorporating movie gaming into system perform when studying for a graduate certificate in the digital humanities and community record by a software made available by George Mason College and the Smithsonian Institution. It was by that function that he was introduced to Twine electronic tale-telling software program.

Roberts assigns a Twine video game he produced, in which college students, as President Abraham Lincoln, are introduced with numerous Civil War-period proof regarding emancipating individuals held as slaves. College students might stick to Lincoln’s footsteps, or adopt a distinct system. The method progress was helped by the summertime stipend application via the WIU Basis and the Place of work of Sponsored Jobs.

Roberts is also performing with teachers of Advanced Placement (AP) U.S. Record, demonstrating them how to use the Twine system in the classroom.

For extra facts about the WIU Division of History, visit wiu.edu/background. For far more facts about the Centennial Honors Faculty, check out wiu.edu/honors.
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Posted By: Jodi Pospeschil ([email protected])
Place of work of College Communications & Marketing and advertising