Replaying history

Squire, K., & Barab, S. (2004). Replaying history: engaging urban underserved students in learning world history through computer simulation games. Paper presented at the Proceedings of the 6th international conference of the learning sciences (ICLS), Santa Monica, California. 

Civilization III was brought into school for underserved students to explore the potential of using games to engage 

learners. Study examines how the learning about history occurs with Civilization III.

History has been treated as myth or heritage and this lead to misconceptions about history, alienate students and 

most students hate the history as a result. The way it has been taught was all about meaningless recitation of 

names, dates and facts, with no understanding of the practices through which historians construct and judge, and the 

connections between events.

With Civilization III, the method of studying history changes from memorizing to exploring emergent properties of a 

simulated system.

The experiment was done with case studies which has multiple data gathering and analysis, pre and post tests.

The collection of data was done by capturing student's gameplay practices, and by capturing student's social 

interactions. The analysis focused on:

- gaming and social practices emerged

- moments of engagement or lack 

- student's displayed understanding of historical phenomena

- affordances and constraints of Civilization III

Findings: 

- Learning to play Civilization was complex (appropriation process)

- After fourth day students started to appropriate the game

- Then it was a process of trying different strategies and examining the game's affordances

- most of the learning came through failure, which caused students to start over with a different strategy

- teacher's primary function was to help students construct narratives for unfolding play and devising strategies that 

brought knowledge of geography or history as a tool for gameplay (scaffolding)

- failure drove recursive cycles of identifying problems, developing interpretations of events, devising solutions, 

implementing solutions, examining results and repeating.

- powerful learning happened when students presented what they learned

As a result, this study suggests that the games in school can be very powerful for engaging learners even thought 

that engagement is a complex process.