My interest is in helping acquisition and retention of history, science, and evidence-based cause-effect thinking, particularly in middle-school students. I have built a successful app from working with a middle-school science teacher and student (Science 8, available on Google Play, Apple App Store, and Kindle Fire App Store), and am looking for partners to try out some other ideas.
Invitation to history teachers
Bring History to Life for Your Students with a Custom Game!
Are you looking for a fun and interactive way to help your students engage with historical events? We’ve developed a unique online game, History Links, designed to make history content more dynamic and engaging.
Here’s how it works: students are presented with a historical event and asked to identify its cause—or, in reverse, to describe the effects of an event. Their answers are then evaluated by ChatGPT based on how plausible, specific, and strong the causal relationship is. After 10 rounds, students can earn the title of “History Master”!
The best part? We can customize this game with your content, tailored specifically for your curriculum and students. Whether it’s a unit on World War II, the American Revolution, or any other historical period, we can have your version of the game ready to go in no time! All you need to provide is a list of historical events.
This is an easy way to reinforce critical thinking, make history fun, and give students an interactive learning experience. Plus, we can have your content live and ready within a day.
We’d love to collaborate with you to bring this exciting opportunity to your students! Please reach out to us at [email protected] to get started.
As with all our games, History Fails is free and contains no advertisements. We make no revenue from this game.
Below are more details of our approach and goals.
Reusable Games, Reusable Content
The following describes the goals of my spreadsheet-based learning games and how they work. For all inquiries from educators looking to partner on the development of a sheet-based learning game, please reach out to me at: [email protected]. There is no cost and no technical work for you.
Learning & teaching—made easier
My first goal is to help students learn. Specifically, I want to help middle school students learn subjects that they find boring. These are subjects that require a lot of knowledge and require them to not only learn facts, but also to develop an understanding of how those facts relate to one another. Memorization is boring, but playing with facts can be fun.
History is this type of subject. Students have to learn not only what happened and when, but also how these events are related and particularly the order in which they occurred. The trouble is, history can be hard for some students. Some find memorizing facts tedious. Others don’t learn well from studying books. Others struggle to meaningfully link concepts together.
For this reason, I have worked to develop learning games that can engage students with diverse interests and learning styles by providing an interactive, differentiated, and, above all, fun way to consume and learn content. Reading books is great. Playing games is also great! Why not do both?
My second (related) goal is to help educators. I know from past experience tutoring (learn more about me and my team here) that quarter after quarter, year after year, teachers are faced with the daunting task of helping dozens of students, all with different learning styles and preferences, learn concepts that might not particularly interest them. So how could I make teachers’ jobs easier with a simple yet scalable solution?
The answer was to build my learning games into game apps and online games. But not rigid, single-purpose games. Flexible game frameworks that would allow anyone—teachers, parents, even students themselves—to use their own content on any topic and have it instantly become a ready-to-play game.
So how does that work in practice?
Table-based learning games
The simplest way to make a learning game that can be used for any topic is to design it to read spreadsheets. Yes, spreadsheets! So that’s what I did. Excel, Google, take your pick. To make it more interesting, I added an image for each item.
I have five different games that all read spreadsheets and load images, then run the game on that content. You can use the same content for all 5 games, or unlimited sets of content for the same game. Better still, it works immediately.
Here are the steps:
- Build a spreadsheet that contains a list of items with a description and an image for each.
- Ideally, have one numeric value (e.g., date or count) for each item (two of the games require this).
- Put the spreadsheet and the images on a server, and tell the game where to find them—or give them to me directly and I’ll connect the dots for you.
- Play!
Want to teach something a bit more complex? No problem. There are other (optional) columns for additional items, such as who did it, the item’s category or ‘clues’ or ‘parts’ (one of the games is based on clues, another on categories), and for some of the games you can add any columns you like (‘effect’ and ‘influence’ are good ones already supported).
Here is a sample spreadsheet to give you an idea of what one looks like.
Once you’ve done it once, you’ll see that it’s easy enough for anyone to do it, even your students.
How to get started
The best way to see if a sheet-based learning game is right for your students is to try one out. The simplest one is History Fails! This is a simple online game (really just a small idea of what could be a game) about history. You are given an event and asked to provide a brief “cause” for that event. The game can also be played in reverse, where you give the effects caused by the event. Your proposition is then evaluated by ChatGPT for likely-to-be-true, strength of the causal relationship, and how specific your proposition is. Your score for each turn is added and after 10 turns, you could be declared a “Master” of the history!
This simple game can be played with topics of any list of historical events. Just a simple list. We would love to work with history teachers to create versions just for their students (available within a day). Please contact us at [email protected]
Mixed-Up Museum is the another simple game: it is online, in 3D, and easy to play. You can try out the game within a few hours of sending me a spreadsheet and images (or putting them on your own server and telling me where it is).
The online History Fails! or the 3D game Mixed-Up Museum can be hosted on any server—your school’s server, my server, an organization’s server, or a friend’s server.
Puddle Hopping is a mobile app and an online browser app. Content in the store app is pre-applied but the online version can all be populated with any content that is on any server. Puddle Hopping is available for iOS, Kindle Fire, or Android, and is available online (for browser) as well.
The online games in Puddle Hopping can be hosted on any server — your school’s server, my server, an organization’s server, or a friend’s server.
For any questions or inquiries, please write to me at [email protected]