Student Testing

Revolution: Learning about history through interactive role play in a virtual environment

by Russell James Francis (visiting scholar at MIT’s Comparative Media Studies)

In the spring of 2005, a series of workshops were set up in MIT’s Teacher Education Program lab for the purpose of exploring the potential of the Revolution system. Four workshops were staged with small groups of children from the Massachusetts home school community and a fifth with a group of 15 pupils from a local high school. During the workshops, each student adopted a virtual persona and role played a day-in-the-life of a citizen within the Revolution game world – a world the allows multiple players to participate in fully immersive interactive drama situated in a virtual re-construction of 18th century Colonial Williamsburg. Following the game students engaged in discussion, guided by the teacher, about aspects of social history during the revolutionary period: social class, political struggle, gender relations, racial tensions, and the strategic importance of having access to information were just some of the topics covered. Finally, students were given an opportunity to demonstrate the knowledge they had gained though virtual role play and reflective discussion in a practical production activity. Initially this took the form of a written exercise in which pupils provided an personal account of their character’s experiences in the form of a diary entry. Later selected pupils produced short machinima movies using MS Movie Maker and combined screen shots (captured from the game) with an audio voice over written and recorded over the top of the visual narrative provided by a sequence of screen shots. The machinima movies and diary entries were shared and pupils further discussed the different perspectives they acquired as a result of taking on a role and participating in the virtual drama.

Research Questions and Methodology

The workshops and research methodology adopted were designed to explore three questions: how might students experience situated role play within the Revolution environment? How might their experience of playing a character within the Revolution simulation impact on a student’s ability to participate in discussion about about aspects of social history? And what new opportunities for rich committed learning are created through this new kind of interactive multimodal educational resource? Data collection involved the use of multiple qualitative methods: stimulated responses made with students working at the computer; audio recordings of a teacher led whole group discussions; in-depth interviews with selected pupils; digital data capture techniques that allowed excerpts of game play to be recorded and saved to disk; and a pupil questionnaire started at the outset but completed at the end of the session. In the final analysis data collected using these methods was triangulated to explore the emergent themes and address the research questions according to the logic of grounded theory.