{"id":2815,"date":"2012-05-15T11:00:04","date_gmt":"2012-05-15T15:00:04","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.playthepast.org\/?p=2815"},"modified":"2012-05-13T11:49:44","modified_gmt":"2012-05-13T15:49:44","slug":"jamestown-adventure-less-is-more","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"http:\/\/www.playthepast.org\/?p=2815","title":{"rendered":"Jamestown Adventure: Less is More"},"content":{"rendered":"

There is a lot of interest in making educational games and history games are no exception. This post kicks off an occasional series of co-authored posts by myself and Marjee Chmiel<\/a>. Marjee has extensive credentials as an educational game designer and educator. She developed an array of educational games for National Geographic, worked on professional development for teachers at PBS, and is currently the school based technology specialist at Thomas Jefferson High School for Science and Technology.<\/p>\n

In this series we plan to review and comment on free educational history games from a practical perspective in the hopes of helping to surface exactly what it is that makes a game valuable for the classroom. We are starting off with a look at Jamestown Adventure<\/a>. Since it is a free online game you can go play it quick and comeback and share your thoughts on it in the comments.<\/p>\n

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Jamestown\u00a0Adventure\u00a0is a relatively simple flash game that we both think is aging quite well. The \u00a0game exemplifies the value that a “less is more” approach to games, one that eschews grandiose notions of immersive worlds, can have for creating little games that are actually useful and used in today’s classrooms. For the sake of comparison, we contrast Jamestown Adventur<\/a>e with Discover Babylon<\/a>, in many ways the exact opposite of Jamestown Adventure.<\/p>\n

Jamestown Adventure: The little game that could<\/h3>\n
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Example of what happens when you consult the charter<\/figcaption><\/figure>\n

Jamestown Adventure falls just slightly on the side of actually being a game, being somewhat of a digital Choose-your-own-Adventure<\/em>. In this small Flash game you get to make a series of decisions, posed as questions, about colonizing Jamestown. For example, in the image below you are deciding where to build your colony. From there you are presented with a series of further choices with explanatory animations. At each step, you have the opportunity to ask a colonist, talk to a native, or consult the primary source, (the text of the town charter). At the end of the game you get a quick report that you can print out and share and compare with others. The report gives you a sense of what actually happened and provides a comparison of your decisions with those of the actual colonists. You end up finding out if you did better or worse than the Colonists.<\/p>\n

The whole game takes about ten to twenty minutes to play, perfect amount of class time and given the amount of time teachers actually have to cover these topics, the time it takes to play the game is mindful of the realities and of the classroom.<\/p>\n

The game is straightforward, but in it\u2019s simplicity it incorporates some really valuable properties. Here are seven different design elements that we think make this a great history education game for a K-12 classroom;<\/p>\n