The Future of Education

Recent pedagogical research has suggested the need to introduce innovative elements in teaching, in pace with technological developments in society and the students’ changing approach to learning. One particularly successful element of this kind is the introduction of PC games. These have proved to enhance the students’ learning experience by promoting: experiential forms of learning, the encouragement of problem solving, fun ways of learning which contribute to motivation, and more. Accordingly, games have been used in a great variety of disciplines, like – to mention a few examples – Sim City urban planner for human geography, simulators of disease in medicine and optometry, simulators of health diseases in psychology, and a great variety of games relevant to the teaching & learning of languages. Accordingly, following these examples, in the last three years I have started to introduce computer games in my history modules. This is particularly relevant for my module on The Spanish World, which deals with the Spanish colonization of the New World and Spain’s rivalry with other colonial powers. I use a PC game, available as a CD-Rom, titled Civilization IV Colonization. Players control settlers from one of the following colonial powers: Spain, France, England, and the Netherlands, which are trying to colonize the new World in the years 1492–1792. After the students play the game, we discuss the game and its implications in class, and the students are requested to answer the following questions as part of a writing assignment:  

1. Identify three historical “facts” that the game gets wrong.  
2. In your opinion, which colonization project is portrayed most correctly? Which is portrayed the most incorrectly?
3. What does the design of the game tell you about the people who made it? (i.e. political, ethnical, cultural, and gender biases)
4.  What would you change to improve the game? (historical accuracy, further complexity, addition of scenarios, etc).

Both the discussion and the coursework prove that the analysis of a PC game can be particularly stimulating for the understanding of human constructions of reality, both past and present, and allows us to think about history in ways that are unavailable in other mediums. In sum, my lecture will present the advantages, alongside some challenges, of using PC games in Higher Education teaching and learning in general, and history in particular.