Play Time: Video Games in the High School History Curriculum

As I've mentioned before, in my day job I am a high school history teacher (the commentaries on this blog about pro wrestling, guitar playing, rock music, movies and ridiculous letters to the editor are merely hobbies). I teach American history to students grades 10-PG at an independent school in Northeastern Pennsylvania. Throughout my two decades in the profession I've worked to find constructive uses of technology in and out of the classroom, and in the past year or so I have found that my students have derived a lot of "edutainment" from playing video games during class. I've used games in a year-long survey class on U.S. History as well as in an advanced elective on the Constitution and Supreme Court. The following is a brief summary of the games we played and how they were received by the students. 

In my U.S. History class I have had great success with the games from a company called Mission-US. These games are like super high-tech versions of the "choose-your-own-adventure" books I used to read in elementary school in the 1980s. Mission-US is a joint effort from New York City's public television channel, game designers and academic experts. As I write this in December 2014 they have produced three games so far:

• Mission One: For Crown or Colony?: in which you play a young boy who is an apprentice in 1770 Massachusetts, who observes the Boston Massacre and has to choose between the Patriots and the Loyalists. 

• Mission Two: Flight to Freedom: in which you play a young girl who is a slave in Kentucky in 1848. During your attempt to escape to the north you encounter fearsome slave catchers and seek out the mysterious Underground Railroad.

• Mission Three: A Cheyenne Odyssey: in which you play a Cheyenne warrior who grows to manhood and leadership of his band. You have to help your group survive through the years and based on your choices will play different roles in the Battle of Little Bighorn. 

They will be releasing a new game early in 2014 called Mission 4: City of Immigrants  in which you would play a young Russian immigrant living on the Lower East Side of New York a century ago who gets caught up in the labor movement. I have been very impressed with the scope of these games and the effort they make to be inclusive of race, gender and economic statuses.

The games are a wonderful mix of action and information.  While I think it helps to have some background in the material, the games do a good job of getting the player up to speed. The students in my classes are quite varied, ranging in age from 15-19 and coming from many different backgrounds (our school has students from over 22 countries) but none of them have ever felt that the game was too hard to figure out, and no one complained that it pandered to them either. 

The way I like to use the games is as a supplement to our standard sequence of reading and discussion.  For Mission One, the students play the game after we've finished reading about the turbulent 1760's and 1770's.  After they play I ask them to compare the game experience to what they read in their textbooks.  The consensus seems to be that playing the role of a person around their own age was a good way of absorbing the key concepts. For Mission Two the students play the game after we finish reading "The Narrative of the Life of Frederick Douglass"; in the book he is disdainful of the boastfulness of the "underground railroad" (which he fears is becoming an "upperground railroad") and the game gives students a better point of view with which to judge this assessment. Last year I did Mission Three as part of a three-week long module between Thanksgiving and Christmas that covered the Indian Removal Act, the Indian Wars of the 1860s and 1870s and the American Indian Movement of the 1970s, culminating in a debate over whether sports teams should have nicknames derived from Native Americans. 

I am fortunate to work at a school where I can reserve an individual laptop computer for each of my students (and where most of them have their own, anyway), so I typically play these games over the course of a 50 minute long class period. If I had shorter periods, or if computers weren't as available I could see the game being played as a homework assignment.  The teachers' guides are very good at listing the estimated time required to play each game, and they also have very useful worksheets and downloadable handouts to share with students. I can't recommend these games enough, and I hope that they continue to develop new ones. 

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In addition to my survey class I also teach trimester length elective classes covering the time period between 1945 and the present. One of the most popular is called "Constitutional Issues", in which students learn through the study of major Supreme Court cases of the period. Instead of a textbook, students read the unabridged opinions of the Court.  It is a very challenging, but rewarding experience for the students, who are essentially doing graduate school level work as high school juniors and seniors. To buttress the readings, and also to provide a fun way of assessing their knowledge of the Constitution and important cases, I have them play several video games from iCivics.org.  iCivics was founded by Justice Sandra Day O'Connor and they have a wide variety of games that fit under the "civics" umbrella, all of which feature entertaining graphics and several of which are quite challenging. In my class, we play the following games:

• Argument Wars: in which you represent one of the sides in an actual Supreme Court case. Your task is to recognize the difference between strong and weak Constitutional arguments. 

• Do I Have A Right?: a turn based game in which you create a law firm and earn points by taking and winning cases based on your knowledge of the Bill of Rights. The more cases you win the more money you have to hire associated, decorate the office, purchase advertisements and reinvest in the business. 

• We The Jury: a turn based game in which you have to persuade the other members of a jury to agree with you in a variety of civil cases. 

The games feature clever animations and are fast moving and engrossing.  One of my students this year absolutely LOVED "Do I Have A Right" and has played it over and over trying to raise her score.  While this may be slightly aberrant behavior, the games do reward replaying. As I mentioned above, the games fit it perfectly during a class period for me, but they could also be done for homework. When the term was over the students ranked the games very highly, praising them as a fun alternative to quizzes as ways of making sure that they learned about the key Constitutional issues in these cases. 

While I doubt that I would ever be able to completely replace reading with edutaining game-play, I am glad to be able to use games as supplements to my regular routine.  When kids see on the weekly syllabus that there will be "video games" they get very excited.  While the games described in this post are not as visually stunning as, say, Assassin's Creed, they are probably more historically accurate and I have found that my students find them to be sufficiently engaging to be very focused for the entire class period. The games also stick in their memories as well as (or better) than a textbook; I can remind them months later of the games and they often have very vivid recall of scenarios from the games. I am so glad that I have these resources for my classroom and I can't wait to see what new games will continue to be developed.  Thanks for reading, and please leave a comment below with your thoughts about video games in the classroom. 

Notes From The Classroom, pt. II--Civil War Casualties

As I mentioned in my last post, I spend a lot of time teaching my high school students about the American Civil War.  Or, to be more accurate, I should say "the Civil War era".  As I tell them on the first day of the school year, I'm a pacifist, and I don't like war.  As a result, I spend a lot of time talking about life during wartime, and the effects of wars on American society, but not a lot of time on the "bang bang, shoot shoot" part.  This usually disappoints a few students (mostly boys) but of course I still make time to cover certain major battles as well as key military leaders and their tactics, so even the more "bloodthirsty" kids have something to look forward to.

This past week I taught the kids about the scale of Civil War casualties, as well as the terrible conditions faced by soldiers of that era, especially those who were wounded in battle. When I teach this class, I have several goals in mind; first, to put the event into a global perspective, and second, to try to relate the information to the wars the United States have been fighting for most of their lives.

I find it helpful to put the Civil War into a global perspective for a couple of reasons.  Primarily, since I teach students from all over the world (my school draws from over 20 nations) I don't want to seem chauvinistic.  And secondly, if I am successful in driving home the point that the Civil War was the most significant event in our nation's history, it stands to reason that civil wars in other countries are equally important.  I start the class by sharing the following facts with the class:

• 3,000,000 soldiers (USA and CSA) fought in the Civil War, which was about 10% of the total population. 

• Approximately 620,000 soldiers died in the war (about 2% of the total population). An equivalent today would be  six million deaths.

I then share the casualty totals of some significant 20th Century civil wars for comparison:

• Russian Civil War (1917-21): 8.8 million
• Chinese Civil War (1927-49): approximately 6 million
• Korean War (1950-53): over 3 million

These numbers typically elicit a strong response, but someone usually raises the significant differences between 19th and 20th century technology.  So I mention that contemporary with the US Civil War was the Taiping Rebellion in China. This civil conflict lasted from 1850-1864 and claimed at least 20 million lives. 

After this perspective, I try to make a comparison to something with which they should be familiar, the terror attacks of Sept. 11, 2001.  At this point I am teaching students who were only four or five years old in 2001, so their recollections are naturally hazy.  But they are quite aware that 9/11 changed their world. Nearly 3,000 people died that day (with many more dying since then, especially rescue workers at Ground Zero).   Our country was horrified by the carnage in 2001, but (thank God) nothing similar has happened to America since then.  But imagine living here 150 years ago.  In the space of four and a half months in 1863, the following battles took place (among others): 

Chancellorsville, Virginia: May 1-4 1863: 30,099 casualties (17,278 USA / 12,821 CSA)

Gettysburg, Pennsylvania: July 1-3 1863: 51,112 casualties (23,049 USA / 28.063 CSA)

Chickamauga, Georgia:Sept. 19-20 1863: 32,624 casualties (16,170 USA / 18,464 CSA)

and that was after two hard years of war, with another year and a half to go.  I ask the students to consider what it must have been like to live in the country back then.  I imagine that people must have been almost in a state of shock.  Everyone must have known someone connected to the war and the tension of never knowing when a loved one's name would show up in the newspaper's death rolls must have been terrible. 

And that is a useful point of contrast to the wars in Afghanistan and Iraq, which have gone on for most of  my students' lives. According to The New York Times, during the last decade, less than 1% of the total population has been on active military duty, compared to 9% during WWII and 10% in the Civil War. This makes it easier for people to have an "out of sight, out of mind" approach to war.  

I also spend time discussing medical science and technological advances in the last 150 years.  We talk about how wounds to the extremities were the most common injury in the Civil War, and that most resulted in amputation.  After grossing the students out with discussions of the highly septic conditions of operating rooms 150 years ago, I ask if they know what the most common injuries are for American soldiers today. According to Catherine Lutz of Brown University, [.pdf] they fall into four categories:

• Traumatic Brain Injury:  A Rand report in 2008 found 19 percent of returning service members reported having experienced a possible traumatic brain injury...Whatever the true number, TBI cases range from severe, penetrating TBI to the more common mild TBI which can display itself in psychosocial dysfunction, seizures, irritability and aggression, depression, confusion and memory loss.

• Post-Traumatic Stress Disorder: Mental injuries, including PTSD, have also been common.  The Veterans  Administration reported 192,114 veterans of the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan had been diagnosed with PTSD through the end of 2010, with these numbers, however, excluding anyone diagnosed and treated outside the VA system...Several features of these two wars have made emotional and cognitive impairment more common, including multiple and extended deployments with less rest between deployments (39 percent of all soldiers who have been to Iraq and Afghanistan have had two or more deployments, even after wounding, and more exposure to handling body parts and seeing friends killed, surviving with more grievous wounds, and higher rates of  TBI.  Other predictors for PTSD include “killing of innocent bystanders, or having to  witness such killings without the ability to intercede, [which] is also associated with more intense psychiatric manifestations. This is of significant concern due to the large numbers  of civilians killed during this current conflict by both coalition forces and the insurgency.”

• Amputation:  More soldiers survive their wounds now than ever before in human history. The widespread use of body armor protecting the vital organs has also  meant an unusually high number of wounded soldiers with multiple amputations (including limbs and genitals) and complex combinations of injuries, including burns,  blindness and deafness, and massive facial injuries.  According to the Army Office of the Surgeon-General, there were 1,621 amputations among US troops in Iraq, Afghanistan, and “unaffiliated conflicts” through September 1, 2010. Half of these were caused by  improvised explosive devices (IEDs). Blast injuries from IEDs often combine penetrating, blunt, and burn injuries. IED shrapnel can include nails, dirt, and clothing and create enough small wounds to exsanguinate the victim. There has also been a high incidence of blinding injuries. 

• Spinal Cord Injury: US News reports that  "explosions are the main cause of spine injuries among wounded U.S. military personnel...Researchers analyzed more than eight years of data on back, spinal column and spinal cord injuries suffered by American military personnel serving in Iraq or Afghanistan. Of nearly 11,000 evacuated casualties, about 600 (nearly 5.5 percent) had a total of more than 2,100 spinal injuries. Explosions accounted for 56 percent of spine injuries, motor vehicle collisions for 29 percent and gunshots for 15 percent, the study found. In 17 percent of spine injuries, the spinal cord also was injured. Fifty-three percent of gunshot wounds to the spine led to a spinal cord injury. 

One of my students pointed out that it is a shame that since so many injuries are "invisible" it will be hard to recognize and thank these veterans for their service to the country.  I thought that was an excellent example of being able to discuss "current events" in the context of a history class.  Thanks for reading!