Masters of History: Teaching History through Online Gaming

Bill Gates recently hailed game-based learning as the future of education, and researchers are just now realizing its potential in the classroom.^[1] Since spring 2015, students in my Modern World History survey at Utah State University have been assigned to play a free online game called Masters of History as a review activity before completing the course final exam. With this game, students learn about important historical figures by matching a description of each figure’s accomplishments with a corresponding name and image. In addition to receiving completion credit just for playing the game, each student receives a score based on their performance and their rank is automatically displayed on the course leaderboard in Canvas, with the top ten scores receiving extra credit. Because students can play the game as many times as they wish, they can work to beat previous scores or compete with their peers and in the process become better acquainted with historical figures like Gandhi, Simon Bolivar, and Nelson Mandela. This presentation will offer a demonstration of the game and then discuss its impact on student learning, comparing student performance on the final exam with and without the game and noting correlations between game performance and exam performance.  This game can be adapted to many different subject areas.

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[1] http://www.eschoolnews.com/2012/07/17/bill-gates-why-game-based-learning-is-the-future-of-education/

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