Gaming in the classroom

“To do this, I have developed a historical game, which I have connected to the pop-culture hit, Game of Thrones. Students have opportunities to work collaboratively (and a bit competitively)
in different teams.”

I like this idea for a classroom because it takes the “normal” way of learning and turns it on its head. This idea of using historical events and people to tell a narrative in a form of a game based on a TV show sounds like a lot of fun and could really help with students’ engagement in class and make learning about history fun for some that might not see it that way.

“The gamification of my classroom is an extension of the desire to engage students in meaningful ways in the classroom. While many history instructors will likely agree that lecturing every class does
not help students approach material creatively.”

I believe that finding creative ways to engage students outside of just lecturing can make all the difference in classroom engagement. I really like how this professor has used this game in their classroom and how they have explained in depth how the game is played and how it can be used in various different ways. This makes it more interesting to me to potentially use in a future classroom because the examples used are open ended and can be applied for many different topics across different classes.

“When gaming the exam using the Game of Thrones setup, the students who see the greatest gains are the students who were initially struggling the most.”

Lastly, this article shows that this method can be tricky at first with exams, but there is a significant improvement as the class continues. The numbers show how well a class can do using this method and it seems to work well in this one case. There is also evidence that students liked the class and how interactive it was for them. All of this gives me more of a reason to want to experiment with this strategy for teaching and using gaming as a tool.

Spalding, Sarah M. “Game of Thrones and Gaming the History Classroom.” The History Teacher 54, no. 3 (May 2021): 569–90.