Pixel International Conferences

Teaching effectively social sciences to secondary school students poses a challenge nowadays to teachers. Triggering their interest in recent history needs the use of appealing strategies. In order to face this and other educational challenges, in 2016 schools from Spain, Italy, Poland, Turkey, Czech Republic and Bulgaria started an Erasmus+ association and presented an innovation project called ‘Historical Board Games for Peace. Making History Alive’. It was approved by the Spanish National Agency to be run for two years, till 2018. With this project we introduced the use of historical board games, commonly known as wargames, into the process of teaching history to students. There is little experience with board games in teaching. Normally their use is related to military intelligence training and education. Indeed, historical board games have a huge, teaching potential because students are actively involved in the learning process, develop logical thinking, decision making, creativity and discover history as a dynamic process, linking it to active citizenship. This potential had not been developed enough in school education. Although there had been some isolated experiences with the use of board games for teaching purposes, there were no major projects involving international cooperation and there wasn’t much awareness of their possibilities for school education. Through our project we tried to seize this potential. We played several strategy games with the pupils participating in the project and also had a common wargame ‘Twillight Struggle’ based on the Cold War, which was played in the different meetings. We also created a new cooperative boardgame called ‘Refugees’ based on the refugee crisis in Europe. This project had a transnational approach to the teaching of social sciences. The issues addressed, improved the quality and efficiency of education in our schools and enhanced creativity and innovation of the students involved. In addition, the methodology based on Content and Language Integrated Learning offered a more dinamic approach to teaching.

Keywords: Social Sciences, Citizenship, Wargames, CLIL, Erasmus+;

References:

 
[1] Arnold, T. (1998). “How to Make Your History Class Hop with Excitement (At Least Once a Semester): Designing and Using Classroom Simulations.” The History Teacher, 31, (2), 193-203.
[2] Cooper, D. F. & Klein, J., (1980). "Board wargames for decision making research," European Journal of Operational Research, Elsevier, vol. 5 (1), pages 36-41, July. doi:10.1016/0377-2217(80)90071-5
[3] Palmer, M. (2016). Red versus blue: Cold War games. Agora, Vol. 51, No. 2, Jun 2016: 51-58. ISSN: 0044-6726.