The Interactive Pasts Conference 2: Juan Hiriart
4Video presentation for the Interactive Pasts Conference 2, October 8-10 2018, Center for Sound and Vision.
Juan Hiriart (University of Salford)
Life Was Really Hard! Designing and Using Digital Games to Explore Medieval Life in Primary Schools
In the last decades, digital games based on historical themes or settings have become an important form of historical engagement, with a great potential to influence popular conceptions about the past. In spite of the growing interest in harnessing this power for the teaching of history in formal educational contexts, still many questions in regard to the representational appropriateness, educational effectiveness, and practical implementation of historical computer games in school classrooms remain unclear. In this paper, I would like to give an overview of a Ph.D. research set to analyse the potential of digital games for historical education. Adopting a practice-based approach, this research was led by the iterative development of a series of historical game prototypes, designed to explore everyday life in early Anglo-Saxon Britain. At different stages of design, these prototypes were evaluated by historians, archaeologists, and educators, moving at a later stage to their implementation and testing within the history curriculum of a primary school. Drawing from this process, this research has contributed to gain a better understanding of the theoretical issues involved in the design and implementation of historical game based learning methodologies, making empirical connections between educational theory, historical learning, and game design.