Description
Are you tired of keeping teaching history and philosophy in the same way year after year?
Do your students feel bored, too?
Would you like to discover a new approach to teaching these subjects?
Then this course is for you!
Gamification refers to the introduction of elements taken from games in non-gaming contexts. Together with game design and game-based learning, it is a powerful technique to captivate student interest and attention and increase their understanding and retention of concepts and ideas.
This course will present many strategies for gamifying lessons in history and philosophy.
Accordingly, it will support secondary school teachers in introducing game-based learning in their teaching activities (content presentation, student tasks, and assignments, evaluations).
Participants will have time to practice all the proposed strategies and create school activities ready for use once they are back in their own country.
They will discover how to present historical content by having students play selected games and board games. Moreover, they will learn a practical method to facilitate board gaming in the classroom.
Participants will also realize how they can ask students to design simple games that will make them familiar with some proposed topic or content. Through designing games, students will acquire new content without even noticing it!
The course will also introduce participants to interactive fiction, an effective medium for creating stories that can be applied effectively to teach philosophical content. Participants will simulate philosophical conversation and write branching stories with ancient (e.g., Plato, Aristotle) and modern (e.g., Hobbes, Locke) philosophers.
Finally, participants will reflect on how to use quizzes and gamifying techniques for assessing not only memory but also HOTS (Higher-Order Thinking Skills). They will discuss basic statistics to understand how properly evaluate student performance.
By the end of the course, participants will have gained several strategies to make history and philosophy come alive in their lessons. They will master the basics of game-based learning to engage their students and make their lessons never the same again!
Learning outcomes
The course will help the participants to:
- Understand the strengths and limits of gamification, game-based learning, and game design in education;
- Introduce games in the classroom to present specific historical content;
- Facilitate student play of board games in the classroom;
- Have students write interactive fiction to simulate philosophical dialogues;
- Ask students to design simple board games to get familiar with the proposed content;
- Evaluate Higher-Order Thinking Skills (HOTS) with quizzes;
- Improve student creativity, storytelling, critical and strategic thinking, curiosity, communication, and collaboration;
- Increase student motivation in the classroom.
Tentative schedule
Day 1 – Introduction to the course
- Introduction to the course, the school, and the external week activities;
- Icebreaker activities;
- Presentations of the participants’ schools.
Gamification and Game-Based Learning. An introduction
- What is gamification?
- The principles of instructional design;
- Why use games in education?
Day 2 – Presenting content with games and board games
- What is game-based learning?
- Learning through play: Pros and cons;
- Board games for teaching history;
- Gaming session;
- How to facilitate board game play in the classroom.
Day 3 – Game design
- Modding, retheming, and game design;
- Assessing projects: when students design games;
- Time for practice: Inventions (History) and Story Tales (Philosophy).
Day 4 – Writing interactive philosophical dialogues
- Interactive fiction in education;
- How to create interactive fiction;
- Interactive fiction and philosophical dialogues;
- Time for practice.
Day 5 – Gamifying assessments
- Still quizzes?
- Assessing Bloom’s 6 levels with quizzes;
- Basic statistics and processing of the results;
- Time for practice.
Day 6 – Course closure and cultural activities
- Course evaluation: round-up of acquired competencies, feedback, and discussion.
- Awarding of the course Certificate of Attendance.
- Excursion and other external cultural activities.