Stories from the History of Czechoslovakia, A Serious Game for Teaching History of the Czech Lands in the 20th Century – Notes on Design Concepts and Design Process

Abstract

Abstract. In the context of curricular history education both commercial entertainment games as well as serious games specifically tailored for educational purposes were employed. Especially the latter types of games were reported as being promising concerning instructional effectiveness. Still, there are not many complex serious games for history education, particularly in the secondary schools context. In this work-in-progress paper, we report on the progress of project Stories from the History of Czechoslovakia, a serious game for teaching history of the Czech lands in the 20th century. We introduce main game concepts, describe two main design challenges we have been facing during the development and how we have addressed them and overview our feasibility study on 71 high-school students. This paper can be informative for researchers and designers working on similar projects.

Principles for the design of a history and heritage game based on the evaluation of immersive virtual reality video games

“…Together with these remarks, current research also emphasizes the idea that the combination of the video game plus the work of the teacher in the classroom is the most effective formula (Evaristo et al, 2016). It is therefore necessary to generate additional material that complement the integration of video games into the teaching-learning process ( Sisler et al, 2012). Both video games and the supporting materials should aim to provide an adequate curricular context that goes beyond gamification and reinforces the contents and educational objectives of the game (Bautista, 2018).…”

Multisensory games-based learning - lessons learnt from olfactory enhancement of a digital board game

“…These games determined also a rise in enthusiasm for visiting museums or other historical places. The history of Czechoslovakia was the subject of one of the few serious games in this discipline [49,50] that generated a positive acceptance in both students and teachers. 1910 is a serious game created for mobile devices to motivate and engage 6th grade students in learning Portuguese history [14] However, there is still no user study to assess the impact of this game on learning or entertainment.…”

Videojuegos y enseñanzaaprendizaje de la historia. Análisis desde la producción investigativa

“…A través del análisis de resultados en aprendizajes mediados por el uso de videojuegos diseñados para enseñar y entender eventos concretos de la historia de un país, Evaristo, Navarro, Vega y Nagano (2016) demostraron comparativamente la mejora en la calidad de los resultados evaluativos de un grupo de estudiantes cuyas clases estuvieron complementadas mediante la estrategia, frente a grupos que no la tuvieron. Este éxito que poco a poco se ha venido registrando en investigaciones alrededor del mundo, se explica por dos razones fundamentales: la mediación explicativa del profesor (Evaristo, et al, 2016); y elementos asociados a las mejoras en el diseño en sí del videojuego (Egea, Ferrer y García, 2017;Šisler, Brom, Cuhra, Cinátl y Gemrot (2012), las cuales en algunos casos están más próximas a la jugabilidad que se presentan en videojuegos de entretenimiento.…”