›Assassin’s Creed‹ in the Classroom: History’s Playground or a Stab in the Dark? 9783111253275, 9783111250724

Citation preview

Assassin’s Creed in the Classroom

Video Games and the Humanities

Edited by Nathalie Aghoro, Iro Filippaki, Chris Kempshall, Esther MacCallum-Stewart, Jeremiah McCall and Sascha Pöhlmann Advisory Board Alenda Y. Chang, UC Santa Barbara Katherine J. Lewis, University of Huddersfield Dietmar Meinel, University of Duisburg-Essen Ana Milošević, KU Leuven Soraya Murray, UC Santa Cruz Holly Nielsen, University of London Michael Nitsche, Georgia Tech Martin Picard, Leipzig University Melanie Swalwell, Swinburne University Emma Vossen, University of Waterloo Mark J.P. Wolf, Concordia University Esther Wright, Cardiff University

Volume 15

Assassin’s Creed in the Classroom History’s Playground or a Stab in the Dark? Edited by Erik Champion and Juan Hiriart

ISBN 978-3-11-125072-4 e-ISBN (PDF) 978-3-11-125327-5 e-ISBN (EPUB) 978-3-11-125347-3 ISSN 2700-0400 Library of Congress Control Number: 2023945451 Bibliographic information published by the Deutsche Nationalbibliothek The Deutsche Nationalbibliothek lists this publication in the Deutsche Nationalbibliografie; detailed bibliographic data are available on the internet at http://dnb.dnb.de. © 2024 Walter de Gruyter GmbH, Berlin/Boston Cover image: Stonehenge, by Adam Steeves Assassin’s Creed® Valhalla – TM & Copyright © Ubisoft Entertainment. All Rights Reserved. Typesetting: Integra Software Services Pvt. Ltd. Printing and binding: CPI books GmbH, Leck www.degruyter.com

Contents Erik Champion and Juan Hiriart Introduction: History’s Playground or a Stab in the Dark? Marc-André Éthier and David Lefrançois Chapter 1 Historical Video Games and Teaching Practices

1

11

Chu Xu, Robin Sharma and Adam K. Dubé Chapter 2 Discovery Tour Curriculum Guides to Improve Teachers’ Adoption of Serious Gaming 35 Ylva Grufstedt and Robert Houghton Chapter 3 Christian Vikings Storming Templar Castles: Anachronism as a Teaching Tool 65 Julien A. Bazile Chapter 4 Ludoforming the Past: Mediation of Play and Mediation of History through Videogame Design 91 Nathan Looije Chapter 5 Exploring History through Depictions of Historical Characters in Assassin’s Creed Odyssey 107 Juan Hiriart Chapter 6 Empathy and Historical Learning in Assassin’s Creed Valhalla Discovery Tour 133 Kevin Péloquin and Marc-André Éthier Chapter 7 The Discovery Tour as a Mediated Tool for Teaching and Learning History 151

VI

Contents

Angela Schwarz Chapter 8 Discovering the Past as a Virtual Foreign Country: Assassin’s Creed as Historical Tourism 169 Hamish Cameron Chapter 9 Classical Creations in a Modern Medium: Using Story Creator Mode in a University Assignment 189 Kira Jones Chapter 10 Assassin’s Creed @ The Carlos: Merging Games and Gallery in the Museum 203 Manuel Sánchez García and Rafael de Lacour Chapter 11 From the Sketchbook to Assassin’s Creed Valhalla: An Experiment in Architectural Education 219 Erik Champion Chapter 12 Assassin’s Creed As Immersive and Interactive Architectural History List of Contributors Index

267

263

239

Erik Champion and Juan Hiriart

Introduction: History’s Playground or a Stab in the Dark? 1 Why Is Assassin’s Creed of Interest to Teachers and Historians? From the very first Assassin’s Creed game, which was published in 2007, Ubisoft’s most popular video game series, the award-winning Assassin’s Creed (https://www.ubi soft.com/en-us/game/assassins-creed), has created spectacular 3D historical adventure settings in the Middle East, Africa, Europe, and North America, with models so impressive the company was asked for help in rebuilding the burned Notre Dame Cathedral in Paris.1 The metrics of user engagement are staggering: in their latest and most successful game, Valhalla, Valhalla players have explored 4 million kilometers of the world and erected over 55 million settlement buildings. In terms of minigames, players have won over 3.5 million matches of the Orlog dice game and 1.8 million players have won at least one drinking game2

According to a tweet by Ubisoft,3 Valhalla alone has been visited by 20 million players, and sales have reached 1 billion US dollars.4 While 140 million copies of the

 BBC, “Notre-Dame fire: Assassin’s Creed’s maker pledges aid,” BBC News, BBC, December 16, 2020. https://www.bbc.com/news/technology-47963835.  Marcus Stewart, “Assassin’s Creed Valhalla Has Biggest Launch Week in Series History,” GAMEiNFORMER, December 16, 2020. https://www.gameinformer.com/2020/11/17/assassins-creed-val halla-has-biggest-launch-week-in-series-history.  Ubisoft, “Twitterpost,” Assassin’s Creed, Twitter, December 16, 2022. https://twitter.com/assas sinscreed/status/1585663823406682112?  James Batchelor, “Infinity and beyond: The future of Assassin’s Creed,” GamesIndustry.biz, December 16, 2022. https://www.gamesindustry.biz/infinity-and-beyond-the-future-of-assassins-creed. Acknowledgements: We would like to thank Maxime Durand at Ubisoft for his help and words of support. https://doi.org/10.1515/9783111253275-001

2

Erik Champion and Juan Hiriart

entire series were sold to 95 million unique players according to statistics gathered in April 20205,6, a more recent blog has updated the figure to 200 million copies.7

2 The Games’ Fascination for Educators and Historians As a window into how games can convey historical events and settings, the success and versatility of Assassin’s Creed are arguably without parallel. Apart from its commercial success, Ubisoft has partnered with the British Library for its Alexander the Great Exhibition,8 promoted tourism,9 developed escape rooms, inspired empathy-building exercises,10 spun off novels and a film, and even teased an upcoming series with Netflix.11 Of particular interest to academics and educators, Assassin’s Creed games have also featured a Discovery Tour, a non-violent, far less interactive semi-guided tour that the parent company Ubisoft has pitched to classrooms as a pedagogical framework, augmenting the work of the teacher.12

 Videogamesstats, “Assassin’s Creed Player Count and Other Stats,” Videogamesstats, December 3, 2022, 2020. https://videogamesstats.com/assassins-creed-facts-statistics/.  Ben Tyrer, “How popular is Assassin’s Creed? The series has sold over 140 million copies,” gamesradar, October 20, 2019. https://www.gamesradar.com/how-popular-is-assassins-creed-theseries-has-sold-over-140-million-copies/. Now: Roger Ramsey, “Assassin’s Creed Valhalla Makes Ubisoft More Than $1 Billion,” Pushsquare, October 20, 2022. https://www.pushsquare.com/news/ 2022/02/assassins-creed-valhalla-makes-ubisoft-more-than-usd1-billion.  Derek Strickland, “Assassin’s Creed franchise hits 200 million sales worldwide,” TweakTown, December 16, 2022. https://www.tweaktown.com/news/88399/assassins-creed-franchise-hits-200million-sales-worldwide/index.html.  Youssef Maguid, “Assassin’s Creed Partners with British Library for Alexander the Great Exhibition,” news ubisoft, Ubisoft, November 13, 2022. https://news.ubisoft.com/en-us/article/4NXZclyvI lERbp0rw1CCDL/assassins-creed-partners-with-british-library-for-alexander-the-great-exhibition.  Bruno H. M. Carvalho, Gabriella G. C. Bertozzi, and Cynthia Correa, “Video Games Generating Tourist Demand: Italy and the Assassin’s Creed Series,” in Sustainable Tourism Development. Apple Academic Press, 2019.  Lisa Gilbert, “‘The Past is Your Playground’: The Challenges and Possibilities of Assassin’s Creed: Syndicate for Social Education,” Theory & Research in Social Education 45, no. 1 (2017). https://doi.org/10.1080/00933104.2017.1228812.  Dexerto, “Assassin’s Creed Netflix series: Release date prediction, plot, setting, more,” Dexerto, February 24, 2023. https://www.dexerto.com/assassins-creed/assassins-creed-netflix-series-re lease-date-trailer-cast-plot-setting-1937283/.  Gieson, Cacho, “New tool in East Bay history class: ‘Assassin’s Creed’ video game,” Mercury News, Bay Area News Group, updated September 18, 2019, accessed December 16, 2022. https:// www.mercurynews.com/2019/09/18/new-tool-in-history-class-assassins-creed-video-game/.

Introduction: History’s Playground or a Stab in the Dark?

3

Ubisoft described the Origins game as a “lost world” while journalists went so far as to call the Origins: Discovery Tour a “virtual museum.”13 The game series contextualizes and motivates an interest in culture and heritage.14 The series is therefore more than just a commercial enterprise. Both outside academics and Ubisoft designers, producers, and historians have communicated the degree and detail of research that goes into each game,15 and Ubisoft has expressed a desire to be a new type of classroom.16 Considering the series’ commercial success and ability to reach multitudes of players, can historians and teachers be criticized for their interest in either the series’ popularity with gamers or in the games’ much-publicized attempts to depict historical events and settings in an engaging interactive digital environment? From a pedagogical standpoint, the game series still has some way to go. It has not replaced teachers,17 but researchers have examined its usefulness in the classroom for teaching history and argued that there is much interest to explore.18 Ubisoft has also recently made some bold promises:19 [To]. . .open up new segments and open up a wider variety of opportunities for players to leap into history.” . . . Côté added he wants to make sure developers are loyal to historical context, treating human history with the “utmost respect,” while encouraging them to be brave enough to “challenge the misrepresentations of the past . . .” “I want our teams to go beyond what they learned in school,” he said. “I don’t want them to water down history or shy away from it.

 Keza MacDonald, “‘We give access to a lost world’: Assassin’s Creed’s new life as a virtual museum,” The Guardian, March 27, 2018, Education. https://www.theguardian.com/games/2018/ mar/27/assassins-creeds-origins-discovery-tour-virtual-museum-ancient-egypt-ubisoft.  Aris Politopoulos et al., “‘History is our playground’: action and authenticity in Assassin’s Creed: Odyssey,” Advances in Archaeological Practice 7, no. 3 (2019). Adrienne Shaw, “The Tyranny of Realism: Historical accuracy and politics of representation in Assassin’s Creed III,” Loading. . . 9, no. 14 (2015).  Politopoulos et al., “‘History is our playground’: action and authenticity in Assassin’s Creed: Odyssey.”  Justin Porter, “Assassin’s Creed Has a New Mission: Working in the Classroom,” New York Times, May 16, 2018. https://www.nytimes.com/2018/05/16/arts/assassins-creed-origins-education. html.  Brian Crecente, “Teachers Still More Effective at Educating Than ‘Assassin’s Creed’,” Variety, June 28, 2018. https://variety.com/2018/gaming/news/assassins-creed-origins-discovery-tour-effec tiveness-1202861325/.  Thierry Karsenti and Simon Parent, “Teaching history with the video game Assassin’s Creed: effective teaching practices and reported learning,” Review of Science, Mathematics and ICT Education 14, no. 1 (2020).  James Batchelor, “Infinity and beyond: The future of Assassin’s Creed.”

4

Erik Champion and Juan Hiriart

The potential contradiction between respecting history and presenting it as “cool” is a fascinating challenge but also a very difficult one, and Ubisoft has been criticized for playing fast and loose with history.20 Aside from the game’s deviation from the historical record, the appropriate question to focus on is how video games convey facts or make historical arguments. From this perspective, games are fundamentally different from historical literature or film, and need to be understood as a new form and not just as an extension of other forms of historical mediation. How might the Assassin’s Creed video game series change or create more flexibility for use and reuse and input in education, exhibition spaces, or virtual tourism? How do scholars and designers see new ways of using games to learn about history that would be of interest to Ubisoft in particular and game companies in general? How do Ubisoft’s designers and context experts attempt to reach out to scholars, teachers, museums, and galleries?

3 The Aims of This Collection of Essays Given both the company’s goals and the deployment of Assassin’s Creed games in the classroom (and other educational settings) the objective of this volume is to inspire further conversations between game designers, consultants, historians, academics, and game design teachers. Assassin’s Creed in the Classroom: History’s Playground or a Stab in the Dark? examines how the Assassin’s Creed video game series evolved and might be further developed, establishing the interdisciplinary dialogue required to fulfill its educational potential. In particular, the chapters discuss the educational capabilities and development opportunities of the game series for history, art history, architecture, and the museum sector. A highly successful video game series that now also publishes accompanying educational multimedia tours, it has enchanted audiences, piqued the interest of historians for its completeness, graphics, and world-building, and raised questions of authenticity, appropriation, and gender roles, and the ethics of simulating and instigating violence and assassination as core gameplay. For these reasons, we have asked a number of academics and teachers how they have used and might use Assassin’s Creed in the classroom and related educational and instructive settings. How might Assassin’s Creed games be improved

 Tof Eklund, “Assassin’s Creed: after 13 years, 12 games and a ton of sales, what’s the secret to the franchise’s success?,” The Conversation, December 16, 2020. https://theconversation.com/assas sins-creed-after-13-years-12-games-and-a-ton-of-sales-whats-the-secret-to-the-franchises-success150265.

Introduction: History’s Playground or a Stab in the Dark?

5

from an educational viewpoint or be adapted as is into curricula? Will it help or hinder more traditional disciplines of humanities? Do scholars and designers foresee new ways of using games to learn about world history and related fields that would also be of commercial interest to Ubisoft in particular and game companies in general? This book is aimed at the classroom (university-level undergraduate), as well as exhibition and gallery and museum spaces, but it also includes thoughtful articles for scholars and designers. The main focus is on how Assassin’s Creed can augment teaching and history-based education, as well as its future potential in education, heritage, and virtual tourism. We have divided this volume into three sections: History through Play; Cultural History, Tours and Tourism; and Creation and Exhibition. In the first section, History through Play, the four chapters describe research into the effectiveness and engagement value of the Assassin’s Creed games when integrated into classroom teaching. In Chapter 1: Historical Video Games and Teaching Practices, Marc-André Éthier and David Lefrançois discuss how the games as a medium and social practice can be utilized to communicate history in the Montreal region, based on research they gathered over five years in some 20 French-language secondary schools. How do history teachers and their 4,000 students use the “texts” of various genres from different media (artifacts, written archives, songs, films, manuals, photos, plays, novels, etc.? The authors analyze the instructions, tasks, and materials used in 10 classes to learn ancient history (Sparta, 500 BCE, and Rome, 50 BCE) via a commercial video game (Assassin’s Creed). Their observations of 1,638 students and interviews with 30 teachers and students reveal a great diversity of uses and divergences in the development of historical thinking. Chapter 2: Discovery Tour Curriculum Guides to Improve Teachers’ Adoption of Serious Gaming by Chu Xu, Robin Sharma, and Adam K. Dubé investigates how the Discovery Tour has made integration of the games more accessible and useful for educators. They discuss several methods that may help learning goals, such as TPACK (Technological, Pedagogical, Content Knowledge) the Learning MechanicGame Mechanic framework, and the Technology Acceptance Model (TAM) in terms of how they can be applied to player experiences and learning outcomes across Discovery Tours of three recent Assassin’s Creed games. Their work with Ubisoft on curriculum guides has garnered attention from other educators.21

 Nathan Hew, “Thanks to them, your next Assassin’s Creed mission is . . . learning history?,” Study International, December 16, 2022. https://www.studyinternational.com/news/assassinscreed-discovery-tour/.

6

Erik Champion and Juan Hiriart

In Ylva Grufstedt and Robert Houghton’s Chapter 3: Christian Vikings storming Templar Castles: Anachronism as a Teaching Tool, we are treated to an exploration of Valhalla (AC:V) as it negotiates issues of historical representation of 9th century Norway and England within the framework of open-world adventure gaming. The chapter explains how this form of “anachronistic tension” of thematic design but broad historical “brushstrokes” can be deployed in a classroom setting to help foster critical play skills. Julien Bazile’s Chapter 4: Ludoforming the Past: Mediation of Play and Mediation of History through Videogame Design differs somewhat from the earlier chapters. He questions the teaching of history through the perspective of computer game design and the discussion of the “substance” that is taught using video games as “boundary works.” The second section: Cultural History, Tours and Tourism; and Creation and Exhibition comprises four more wide-ranging chapters. Nathan Looije’s Chapter 5: Studying Greek Culture through Historical Characters critically discusses opportunities for interactive playfulness in Assassin’s Creed: Odyssey’s Discovery Tour and its depiction of Ancient Greece. He suggests ways to improve interaction and the presentation of historical figures. Nathan Looije’s Chapter 5: Studying Greek Culture Through Historical Characters In Assassin’s Creed Odyssey focuses on the depiction of historical characters, analyzing their historical representation and roles at the service of the game’s gameplay and narrative. Looije takes a critical look at the character’s historical accuracy, interactivity, and underlying stereotypes used in their construction, suggesting further design and development opportunities for their educational use in education. Chapter 6: Empathy and Historical Learning in Assassin’s Creed Valhalla Discovery Tour, by Juan Hiriart, is a reflective examination of the gameplay and teaching of social history and the importance of empathy and care. For this analysis, Hiriart focuses on Discovery Tour: Viking Age, discussing the game’s narrative and gameplay devices as drivers of historical empathy. Following this critical review, he also proposes ways in which these systems can be productively implemented and used in a history curriculum. Kevin Péloquin and Marc-André Ethier’s Chapter 7: Ubisoft’s Ancient Greece Discovery Tour as a Pedagogical Tool for a School Trip explores the games as previsualization learning tools for school trips. They argue that interactive and immersive games, especially through virtual reality, “offer the occasion to question and interpret the traces of the past during the preparational phase of the academic trip.” The third and final section, Creation and Exhibition, covers the application and potential of the Assassin’s Creed series to communicate via historical tourism,

Introduction: History’s Playground or a Stab in the Dark?

7

a myth class, or a gallery, in architectural studio teaching, and in the teaching of architectural history itself. Chapter 8: Discovering the Past as a Virtual Foreign Country: Assassin’s Creed as Historical Tourism, by Angela Schwarz, discusses tourist historical ‘experiences’ from Black Flag (which Ashraf Ismael declared was “about historical tourism”) to Odyssey (with its “historic places”) as specific approaches to learning about the past, or rather, meeting with representations of the past. Chapter 9: Classical Creations in a Modern Medium: Using Story Creator Mode in a University Assignment, by Hamish Cameron, explores the Story Creator mode for Assassin’s Creed Odyssey and how it arguably offers players the opportunity to “interact with history like never before” by creating their own quests on a web-based platform that can then be played by other users of the game. Can a quest creation tool be productively used as an assessment tool in a university classroom? This chapter discusses his assignment option using Story Creator mode in two 300-level classes. How can this mode of play be used to demonstrate mastery of primary source material and research techniques, thoughtful engagement with class content, and reflective learning on the process of constructing content for commercial games? He also considers other pedagogical possibilities and ethical questions raised by this process. Chapter 10: Assassin’s Creed @ the Carlos: Merging Videogames and Education in the Gallery by Kira Jones explores how the game’s Discovery Tour (actually three Tours) can be deployed in Greek/Roman and Egyptian galleries. In what ways do gallery tours differ from other educational settings and visitor expectations? The author provides useful tips and advice for future tours involving Assassin’s Creed games and their related Discovery Tour mode. Chapter 11: From the Sketchbook to Assassin’s Creed Valhalla: An Experiment in Architectural Education by Manuel Sanchez Garcia and Rafael de Lacour recounts how their students have explored the games as architecture, in architectural studio courses in both Spain and Colombia, and as design aids to inspire them to create illustrative arguments for lost, imagined, and reconstructed built sites. Chapter 12: Assassin’s Creed as Immersive and Interactive Architectural History by Erik Champion investigates how interaction and mechanics in the series can be meaningfully and critically used in the teaching of architectural history. Can we use commercial video games such as the Assassin’s Creed series to add rich immersiveness and meaningful interactivity to architectural history? In this chapter, he argues for a resounding yes: student-led decision-making, a cultural sense of place through smarter NPCs, and heightened embodiment can be developed with both current and potential future versions of these games, especially with Origins, Odyssey, Valhalla, and upcoming new games.

8

Erik Champion and Juan Hiriart

Bibliography Batchelor, James, “Infinity and Beyond: The Future of Assassin’s Creed,” GamesIndustry.biz, December 16, 2022. https://www.gamesindustry.biz/infinity-and-beyond-the-future-of-assassins -creed. BBC, “Notre-Dame Fire: Assassin’s Creed’s Maker Pledges Aid,” BBC News. BBC, April 17, 2019. https://www.bbc.com/news/technology-47963835. Cacho, Gieson, “New Tool in East Bay History Class: ‘Assassin’s Creed’ Video Game,” Mercury News. Bay Area News Group, August 7, 2022. https://www.mercurynews.com/2019/09/18/new-tool-inhistory-class-assassins-creed-video-game/. Carvalho, Bruno H. M., Gabriella G. C. Bertozzi, and Cynthia Correa, “Video Games Generating Tourist Demand: Italy and the Assassin’s Creed Series,” in Sustainable Tourism Development (Apple Academic Press, 2019), 305–326. Crecente, Brian, “Teachers Still More Effective at Educating Than ‘Assassin’s Creed’,” Variety, June 28, 2018. https://variety.com/2018/gaming/news/assassins-creed-origins-discovery-toureffectiveness-1202861325/. Dexerto, “Assassin’s Creed Netflix Series: Release Date Prediction, Plot, Setting, More,” Dexerto, February 24, 2023. https://www.dexerto.com/assassins-creed/assassins-creed-netflix-seriesrelease-date-trailer-cast-plot-setting-1937283/. Eklund, Tof, “Assassin’s Creed: After 13 Years, 12 Games and a Ton of Sales, What’s the Secret to the Franchise’s Success?,” The Conversation, December 16, 2020. https://theconversation.com/assas sins-creed-after-13-years-12-games-and-a-ton-of-sales-whats-the-secret-to-the-franchisessuccess-150265. Gilbert, Lisa, “‘The Past Is Your Playground’: The Challenges and Possibilities of Assassin’s Creed: Syndicate for Social Education.” Theory & Research in Social Education 45, no. 1 (2017), 145–155. https://doi.org/10.1080/00933104.2017.1228812. Hew, Nathan, “Thanks to Them, Your Next Assassin’s Creed Mission Is . . . Learning History?,” Study International. Study International, 16 December 2022. https://www.studyinternational.com/news/ assassins-creed-discovery-tour/. Karsenti, Thierry and Simon Parent. “Teaching History with the Video Game Assassin’s Creed: Effective Teaching Practices and Reported Learning.” Review of Science, Mathematics and ICT Education 14, no. 1 (2020), 27–45. MacDonald, Keza. “We Give Access to a Lost World: Assassin’s Creed’s New Life as a Virtual Museum.” The Guardian, March 27, 2018, Education. Accessed June 16, 2020. https://www.the guardian.com/games/2018/mar/27/assassins-creeds-origins-discovery-tour-virtual-museumancient-egypt-ubisoft. Maguid, Youssef, “Assassin’s Creed Partners with British Library for Alexander the Great Exhibition,” news Ubisoft, November 13, 2022. https://news.ubisoft.com/en-us/article/4NXZclyvI lERbp0rw1CCDL/assassins-creed-partners-with-british-library-for-alexander-the-great-exhibition. Politopoulos, Aris, Angus A. A.Mol, Krijn H. J. Boom, and Csilla E. Ariese, “‘History Is Our Playground’: Action and Authenticity in Assassin’s Creed: Odyssey.” Advances in Archaeological Practice 7, no. 3 (2019), 317–23. Porter, Justin, “Assassin’s Creed Has a New Mission: Working in the Classroom,” New York Times, August 7, 2022, 2018. https://www.nytimes.com/2018/05/16/arts/assassins-creed-originseducation.html.

Introduction: History’s Playground or a Stab in the Dark?

9

Ramsey, Roger, “Assassin’s Creed Valhalla Makes Ubisoft More Than $1 Billion,” Pushsquare, October 20, 2022. https://www.pushsquare.com/news/2022/02/assassins-creed-valhalla-makesubisoft-more-than-usd1-billion. Shaw, Adrienne. “The Tyranny of Realism: Historical Accuracy and Politics of Representation in Assassin’s Creed III.” Loading . . . 9, no. 14 (2015), pp. 4–24. Stewart, Marcus, “Assassin’s Creed Valhalla Has Biggest Launch Week in Series History,” GAMEiNFORMER, December 16, 2020. https://www.gameinformer.com/2020/11/17/assassinscreed-valhalla-has-biggest-launch-week-in-series-history. Strickland, Derek, “Assassin’s Creed Franchise Hits 200 Million Sales Worldwide,” TweakTown, December 16, 2022. https://www.tweaktown.com/news/88399/assassins-creed-franchise-hits -200-million-sales-worldwide/index.html. Tyrer, Ben, “How Popular Is Assassin’s Creed? The Series Has Sold over 140 Million Copies,” gamesradar, October 20, 2019. https://www.gamesradar.com/how-popular-is-assassins-creedthe-series-has-sold-over-140-million-copies/. Ubisoft, “Twitterpost,” Assassin’s Creed. Twitter, December 16, 2022. https://twitter.com/assassins creed/status/1585663823406682112? Videogamesstats, “Assassin’s Creed Player Count and Other Stats,” Videogamesstats, December 16, 2022. https://videogamesstats.com/assassins-creed-facts-statistics/.

Marc-André Éthier and David Lefrançois

Chapter 1 Historical Video Games and Teaching Practices Abstract: Video games are both a medium and a social practice occupying a growing place in the lives of students. History teachers are increasingly using this medium in the classroom and taking into account the effects of this social practice on the construction of students’ historical culture. These teaching situations should be investigated, and history didacticians are doing so more and more frequently in Québec. Since the mythologies used in video games might differ from country to country, this issue should also be compared internationally. As part of research conducted over five years in some 20 French-language secondary schools in the Montreal region on how history teachers and their 4,000 students use “texts” of various genres from various media (artifacts, written archives, songs, films, manuals, photos, plays, novels, etc.), we analyzed the instructions, tasks, and materials used in 10 classes to learn ancient history (Sparta, 500 BCE, and Rome 50 BCE) with a commercial video game (Assassin’s Creed). In 2018 and 2019, we analyzed the material, observed classes (1,638 students), and interviewed 30 teachers and students. Our analysis shows that there is a great diversity of uses made in class by teachers, with very different results in terms of historical thinking development. The most promising practices involve some investigation and corpus analysis, but most of the time, students only have to look for information to transcribe. Keywords: Secondary school history teaching, history teaching in Québec, digital history, video games in school, historical thinking skills, critical thinking, case study, ethnographic approach, lay history, Assassin’s Creed

1 Introduction With the proliferation of technological media (smartphones, tablets, computers, consoles, and virtual reality headsets), accessing and consuming historical content through video games has become an important phenomenon. The availability and popularity of this mode of consumption date back to before the 1990s and have grown steadily. This trend is also present in Canada, where the industry is thriving, and the number of individuals who identify as regular gamers is increasing (Canadian Entertainment Software Association). High school students consume a wealth of https://doi.org/10.1515/9783111253275-002

12

Marc-André Éthier and David Lefrançois

information about the past outside of school in a variety of formats, mostly fictional. Research has shown that this affects how they perceive history (Fink, 2018; Grever and Van Nieuwenhuyse, 2020). Video games are both a medium and a social practice that occupy a growing place in the lives of students. Increasingly, history teachers are using this medium in the classrooms and are considering the effects of this social practice on constructing students’ historical culture.1 To achieve this, video games are being used to teach students to problematize, investigate, and debate with autonomy, rigor, and tolerance of divergent interpretations, thus familiarizing them with the heuristic approaches and the critical ethos of scholarly history. These teaching situations and their effect on learning history should be investigated, and history education researchers are carrying out more and more studies in the field.2 This chapter aims to examine the ways in which history teaching could take advantage of lay history, in general, and digital lay history, in particular, to develop students’ historical thinking skills. It offers a case study of teaching and learning with video games, based on the preliminary results of three studies in Québec school settings. These studies were conducted as part of a two-stage research program on using the Assassin’s Creed video game in formal schooling and are part of a large research program conducted over five years in some 20 French-language secondary schools in the Montreal area on how history teachers and their students use texts of various genres from different media (artifacts, written archives, songs, films, manuals, photos, plays, novels, etc.).

 Peter Mozelius, Wilfredo Hernandez, Johan Sällström and Aandreas Hellerstedt, ‘‘Students’ attitude towards the use of educational video games to develop competencies,” International Journal of Information and Communication Technologies in Education 5, no. 2 (2017), 29–50.  Julien Bazile, ‘‘La perspective de l’action: l’exemple d’Assassin’s Creed,” in Mondes Profanes, eds. Marc-André Éthier and David Lefrançois (Québec: Presses de l’Université Laval, 2021), 215–233; Vincent Boutonnet, ‘‘Interprétations historiques et construction de mondes virtuels,” in Mondes Profanes, eds. Marc-André Éthier and David Lefrançois (Québec: Presses de l’Université Laval, 2021), 165–180; Simon Dor, ‘‘Les jeux de stratégie à thématique historique,” in Mondes Profanes, eds. Marc-André Éthier and David Lefrançois (Québec: Presses l’Université Laval, 2021), 191–206; Marijo Émond, Sébastien Trempe and Alexandre Lanoix, ‘‘Récit de pratique: apprendre l’histoire et la géographie au primaire à l’aide de Minecraft. In Mondes Profanes, eds. Marc-André Éthier and David Lefrançois (Québec: Presses de l’Université Laval, 2021, 181–190); Alexandre JolyLavoie, ‘‘Assassin’s Creed: synthèse des écrits et implications pour l’enseignement de l’histoire,” in Agentivité et citoyenneté dans l’enseignement de l’histoire. Un état de la recherche en didactique de l’histoire au Québec, eds. Marc-André Éthier and David Lefrançois (Montreal: M Éditeur, 2019), 203–217; Frédéric Yelle, ‘‘Étudier Assassin’s Creed comme vecteur d’histoire profane pour développer la pensée historienne chez les élèves du secondaire,” in Mondes Profanes, eds. Marc-André Éthier and David Lefrançois (Québec: Presses de l’Université Laval, 2021), 234–242.

Chapter 1 Historical Video Games and Teaching Practices

13

The first-stage study focuses on short-term memorization of declarative knowledge – after using the commercial video game Assassin’s Creed: Origins in the classroom (Egypt 50 BCE). It was conducted in 2017–2018 with 321 students, ages 12 to 17, from nine secondary schools, using a quasi-experimental method. This chapter will concentrate largely on this first study. The second and third studies that form the second stage were designed using an ethnographic approach and were conducted in 2018–2019. In the second study, we analyzed the instructions, tasks, and materials exploited in classes to learn ancient history (Greece 500 BCE) with Assassin’s Creed Odyssey. In the third study, we analyzed the material, observed classes, and interviewed teachers and students. The analysis shows that there was a great diversity of uses made in class by teachers, with very different results in terms of historical thinking development. As we will see, the most promising practices were those in which students conducted investigation and corpus analysis. However, most of the time, students only had to look for information to transcribe. Analyses of teaching lessons with a video game confirm that this practice does not replace the teacher and does not encourage the processes associated with the critical approach of historians.3 Without the necessary training and tools, most teachers do not use video games to practice students’ critical thinking. Video games diversify their teaching methods and allow them to illustrate their lectures with examples;4 in turn, this endorses the naive consumption of discourse and reinforces a culture of dogma.5

2 Theoretical Context Lay (or “everyman”) history and its influence on society have long been a topic of reflection in academia: Mr. Everyman does not live by bread alone; and on all proper occasions his memory of things said and done, easily enlarging his specious present beyond the narrow circle of daily affairs, will, must inevitably, in mere compensation for the intolerable dullness and vexation of the

 Marc-André Éthier and David Lefrançois, “L’enseignement des sciences sociales sur tous les écrans: enjeux et perspectives.” Revue de recherche en littératie médiatique multimodale, no. 7, May 2018, 1–22.  Éthier, Marc-André and David Lefrançois (eds.), Mondes profanes. Enseignement, fiction et histoire (Québec: Presses de l’Université Laval, 2021), 155–244.  Marc-André Éthier, David Lefrançois, and Sabrina Moisan, “Trois recherches exploratoires sur la pensée historique et la citoyenneté à l’école et à l’université,” in Histoire, musées et éducation à la citoyenneté: recherches récentes, eds. Jean-François Cardin, Anik Meunier, and Marc-André Éthier (Montreal: MultiMondes, 2010), 183–211.

14

Marc-André Éthier and David Lefrançois

fleeting present moment, fashion for him a more spacious world than that of the immediately practical. (. . .) This outer pattern of remembered events that encloses and completes the central pattern of his personal experience, Mr. Everyman has woven, he could not tell you how, out of the most diverse threads of information, picked up in the most casual way, from the most unrelated sources – from things learned at home and in school, from knowledge gained in business or profession, from newspapers glanced at, from books (yes, even history books) read or heard of, from remembered scraps of newsreels or educational films or ex cathedra utterances of presidents and kings, from fifteen-minute discourses on the history of civilization broadcast by the courtesy (it may be) of Pepsodent, the Bulova Watch Company, or the Shepard Stores in Boston. Daily and hourly, from a thousand unnoted sources, there is lodged in Mr. Everyman’s mind a mass of unrelated and related information and misinformation, of impressions and images, out of which he somehow manages, undeliberately for the most part, to fashion a history, a patterned picture of remembered things said and done in past times and distant places. It is not possible, it is not essential, that this picture should be complete or completely true: it is essential that it should be useful to Mr. Everyman; and that it may be useful to him he will hold in memory, of all the things he might hold in memory, those things only which can be related with some reasonable degree of relevance and harmony to his idea of himself and of what he is doing in the world and what he hopes to do.6

In common with film and other vectors of popular history, historical video games (HVGs) inflect real references or place them in a fantasized historical frame, or even alter what we know as history, since humans (often unknowingly) construct their social representations by interacting with a wide array of semiotic materials.7 But as Seixas (1994) has shown for the cinema, we must consider other factors beyond history that these mediums convey, including the type of interactions participants have with the film’s historical content, which will impact the impression they form of the content. Like the historical dramas presented in films, HVGs illustrate visions of the past circulating within society8 and are thus not ideologically neutral. HVGs engage the participant in thinking, deciding, and ‘acting’ in a historical context.9

 Carl Becker, ‘‘Everyman His Own Historian.” The American Historical Review 37, no. 2 (1932), 221–236.  Margaret Conrad, Ercikan Kadriye, Gerald Friesen, Jocelyn Létourneau, Delphin A. Muise, David Northrup, and Peter Seixas, Canadians and their pasts, Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 2013; Lowenthal, David, The Past is a Foreign Country – Revisited, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2015; James V. Wertsch, Voices of the mind: A sociocultural approach to mediated action, Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1991.  Adam Chapman, ‘‘Digital games as history. How videogames represent the past and offer access to historical practice,“ New York/London: Routledge, 2016.  Lindsey Joyce, “Kentucky route zero, or, how not to get lost in the branching narrative system,” in The play versus story divide in game studies: Critical essays, ed. Matthew W. Kapell, 17–27, Jefferson, NC: McFarland & Company, Inc. Publishers, 2016; Shaw, Adrienne, “The tyranny of realism: Historical accuracy and politics of representation in Assassin’s Creed III.” The Journal of the Canadian Game Studies Association 9, no. 14 (2015), 4–24.

Chapter 1 Historical Video Games and Teaching Practices

15

The immersive and interactive nature of HVGs distinguishes them from fictional historical films insomuch as they mediate a relationship with historical references, notably as their approach is to let the player’s actions impact their destiny. Indeed, whether or not their goals go beyond entertainment,10 video games involve game mechanics that do not fall within the lexical field of cinematography or television: challenges, obstacles, skill, chance, memory, speed, choice, competition, cooperation, rewards, etc. Gilbert’s 2019 study confirmed that high school students believe that the immersive experience of the video game contrasts with school and other media because of the feeling they have when they play Assassin’s Creed, given the immediate access to history it offers and because of the empathy they say they feel towards the people of the past. Moreover, a number of video games prominently showcase reconstitutions of past events (Age of Empires, Civilization, Pike and Shot, etc.), but the modulations that HVGs bring to the academic narrative – which may or may not coincide with empirical evidence and transpose themselves into a student’s naïve, individual perceptions of history – are ignored. Despite some superficial faults (errors, violence, etc.) and widespread concern that “video games promote aggression, reduce pro-social behavior, increase impulsivity and interfere with cognition as well as mood in their players” (Kühn et al., 2019, p. 1220), the use of HVGs in the classroom is interesting and thought-provoking, in particular because it increases the circulation of factual knowledge (whether the facts are true or not) and motivation in students.11 Nonetheless, even where they reflect state-of-the-art historiographical concepts and comply with conclusions of scholarly work, HVGs have the disadvantage of short-circuiting the appropriation of the approach that lies at the heart of historical thought:12 the critical, heuristic, and interpretative process that is subject to evidence-based debates, as is any scientific process. It is this disciplinary attitude to knowledge that must be reinforced so that students mobilize historical knowledge autonomously in a lasting and functional way outside of school. Might playing video games make it possible to develop a critical approach to historical sources and to use it to analyze popular history as well as current political discourse? Since teachers must respond to their students’

 Gilles Brougère, Jouer/apprendre. Paris: Economica, 2005.  José Martí-Parreño, Ampara Galbis-Córdova, and Maria José Miquel-Romero, ‘‘Students’ attitude towards the use of educational video games to develop competencies,” in Computers in Human Behavior 81 (2018), 366–377; Alberto A. Cattaneo, Hans van der Meij, and Florinda Sauli, ‘‘An Empirical Test of Three Instructional Scenarios for Hypervideo Use in a Vocational Education Lesson,” in Computers in the Schools 35, no. 4 (2018), 249–267.  Sam Wineburg, Why Learn History (When It’s Already on Your Phone). Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2018.

16

Marc-André Éthier and David Lefrançois

questions and lay the groundwork for meaningful reflection on the value of the information provided by HVGs, they are motivated to meet the challenges this issue poses.13 Despite this, and despite the explosion of research into video games and learning, the empirical research published so far on the use of HVGs in class remains scarce, and the studies lack communication between them and are based on data consisting of analyses of (a) self-reported anecdotes about the integration of a specific HVG in a course designed and used by a teacher, usually in a parttime or fragmented manner; (b) HVG content unrelated to its effects on the learning of historical thinking and dynamics as a scientific discipline; (c) the effects of simulation and management HVGs like SimCity and Minecraft on post-secondary students; (d) interviews and surveys; and (e) theorization.14 To date, in other words, no cohesive research program at a national or international level has brought together around the same infrastructure different research activities that systematically and transversally address the nature, potential, and impact of video games on the progression of critical thinking, on learners, and on methods that can optimize the use of video games. There has been no proposal to collaborate with teachers to develop adapted and effective teaching-assessment materials and lessons capable of accompanying students in the development of their critical thinking and evaluating the effects of the use of these tools and devices in the classroom.15 In the long term, we intend to help meet these needs by producing tools and disseminating information to stakeholders (educational institutions, school boards, etc.).

3 First Stage: Exploratory Quantitative Research Having noted that despite this daily access to popular history, information was still lacking on the effects of HGVs in class,16 we wanted to see what knowledge students

 Éthier and Lefrançois, Mondes profanes, 2021. 155–244.  Dominic Arseneault and Jonathan Lessard, ‘‘Histoire et jeux vidéos: construction, stratégie, aventure.” in Mondes Profanes, eds. Marc-André Éthier and David Lefrançois (Québec: Presses de l’Université Laval, 2021), 155–163; Boutonnet, Interprétations historiques et construction, 2021. 165–180; Lisa Gilbert, “‘Assassin’s Creed reminds us that history is human experience’: Students’ senses of empathy while playing a narrative video game.” Theory & Research in Social Education 47, no. 1 (January 2019), 108–137.  Éthier and Lefrançois, Mondes profanes, 2021.  The authors would like to thank Catherine Déry and Alexandre Joly-Lavoie for their help preparing and conducting this study, as well as the SSHRC for financial aid, and Ubisoft for its logistics support.

Chapter 1 Historical Video Games and Teaching Practices

17

could acquire from the exploitation of this resource, and so we prepared a semiexperimental research design. Could using a serious game generate the same level of memorization of declarative knowledge as a traditional class? The research would still be exploratory, however, in that the results were to be used primarily to prepare further research focused on the long-term memorization and development of historical heuristics (contextualization, corroboration, etc.) and concepts (society, politics, agency, critical thinking, etc.) of greater didactic value. Our main research question was a limited one: we wanted to compare changes in the results of students who used serious video games to learn about history with those of students who were exposed to the same information from a lecture by a teacher alone. We therefore prepared a study in which students of the same age from nine secondary school sites were randomly divided into two equal groups per site and received the same amount of instruction about the same content: group 1 (the control group) was provided with direct face-to-face instruction, and group 2 (the experimental group) was exposed to self-taught learning supported by a virtual visit (Figure 1). The research design also included a pre-test and post-test, both on the class content. We chose to use the Discovery Tour (DT) from the Assassin’s Creed Origins video game, an educational module (free of regular violence or the constraints of the game), which boasts excellent graphic quality. It is set in Ptolemaic Egypt, a society that is not included in compulsory Québec history courses, although it is routinely highlighted as a point of comparison. More specifically, we shifted the content of the course (in the test and control groups) to the Library of Alexandria in the 1st century BCE. To increase participation by the schools, we planned to conduct the study after school, and not in classtime, so that the duration of the experiment would be short; to increase student participation and equity, students in the control group would be allowed to manipulate the joysticks to take the tour after the experiment. In total, the experiment was to last less than an hour. Since the lecture and the virtual tour were to be of the same duration, we chose the virtual visit of the Library of Alexandria, a capsule lasting 12 minutes. Both activities (test and control) were timed and ended at the same time (12 minutes). As the tests had to be corrected quickly by a small team, we opted for a pretest and a post-test made up of demographic and general questions (in the pretest: age, gender, etc.) and questions about simple declarative (factual) knowledge about which there is no historiographical debate (which allowed us to have a 100% consensus among the reviewers). To establish a pre-test score that was as uniform as possible, we chose questions that almost no students would know the answer to before they received the relevant instruction. To increase the likeli-

18

Marc-André Éthier and David Lefrançois

Figure 1.1: The (semi-experimental) research model.

hood of students answering all the questions they were able to in the post-test in the allotted time, we limited their number and favored multiple-choice questions (mostly Likert type) and short, constructed answers (one or a few words). This also helped to maintain reviewer fidelity at the correction stage.

4 Limitations The research design includes the limitations that this was not an authentic classroom context, the measurements (tests) were taken without latency, and the selected questions were anecdotal and did not measure anything other than the short-term memorization of declarative knowledge. The study did not consider other modalities that would allow players to explore this reconstruction of the nomes of Ancient Egypt like a tourist travelling in time freely (on foot, on horseback, as the crow flies, etc.). The teaching did not vary from one site to another, therefore, and the same high school teacher, who has a master’s degree in classical studies, was recruited for the task.

Instruments The instruments used included an online questionnaire (SurveyMonkey with QR codes), 21 consoles (for the test group’s guided tour), and 40 tablets (for the questionnaire to be completed by students in the control and experimental groups), a questionnaire and a PowerPoint slide show with the same content (including ele-

Chapter 1 Historical Video Games and Teaching Practices

19

ments taken from the guided tour: the photo of a bust of Ptolemy I, a map, etc.). The game and consoles were lent by the game’s manufacturer, Ubisoft.

5 Sampling A convenience sample was established. We contacted the school boards (the local governments that manage public education at the primary and secondary levels) in the greater Montreal area and the private schools with which we were in contact (private schools are subject to the same curriculum as public schools). Nine schools agreed to analyze our applications for a certificate of ethics and to disseminate information to students in the chosen age group. Forty students (who also had parental approval to participate in the study) were randomly selected from the volunteers in each of the nine schools. The complete sample was therefore composed of 360 students. Owing to missing informed consent forms or incomplete post-tests, the total number of participants was 321, distributed among one public school in Montreal East, five private schools in Montreal, two schools on the North Shore, and one school on the South Shore. A total of 204 students (over 60%) were aged 12 or 13, 98 (about 30%) were 14 or 15, and 29 (about 9%) were 16 or 17. Two hundred and thirty-one students (72%) were boys, and 90 were girls (28%). A large majority of the students in the sample played video games often (83%), which was not surprising for a sample of volunteers and fairly representative of the 12–17 age group. There was therefore generally no technical barrier to the use of the medium. That said, few students seemed to be volunteering for the video game component of the study, as most students in the sample said they were interested (0.9% ‘not at all,’ 4.7% ‘a little,’ 31.2% ‘moderately,’ 46.7% ‘a lot,’ and 16.5% ‘enormously’) in the history of Egyptian antiquity in Cleopatra’s time.

Teaching Content Studied The teacher-led course was of the same duration as the video game tour (12 minutes). It presented a comprehensive portrait of Egypt at the time of the Library’s existence; the Library of Alexandria; the great minds of the time; other great thinkers; and important discoveries. So that the teaching would not vary from one site to another, the same high school teacher was used. The teacher has an M.A. in classical studies. The pre-test and post-test questions related to the abovementioned teaching content:

20

1. 2. 3. 4. 5. 6. 7. 8.

Marc-André Éthier and David Lefrançois

For what scientific purpose was the Library built? Does the Library still exist? How did the Library obtain documents? Did the Library attract Greek intellectuals? What were the main philosophical schools of the time? Name a Greek poet who lived in Alexandria whose poems were almost as famous as those of Homer. Euclid invented a branch of mathematics. Which one? What very famous formula did Eratosthenes develop while he was director of the Library of Alexandria?

6 Description of Results The first type of data collected concerned students’ motivation to obtain information themselves using any means of their choice (books, television, the Web, etc.) over the period studied, which they self-reported by filling out the online Likert survey (Table 1.1). The study had a very weak effect on their intention to consult documents relating to the history of Ancient Egypt, but the difference nevertheless increased between the pre-test and post-test in favor of those who did not intend to seek further information, rising from 9% to 22%. More specifically, the proportion of students who claimed to want to learn more decreased (from 45% to 39%) between the pre-test and the post-test. This may mean either that these students believed they had obtained all the information they needed or that the study diminished their interest in history. Table 1.1: Total percentage count (rounded off) of students wishing to consult historical documents about Ancient Egypt.

Yes No

Pre-test

Post-test

 

 

The evolution of the students’ interest in ancient history does not allow us to resolve this question, since it changes in a contradictory fashion depending on the group. While students in both groups initially had the same level of interest (roughly a quarter with little interest in the history of Ancient Egypt and threequarters with some to great interest), those in the control group lost interest (from 74.1% to 70.4%) and those in the experimental group increased their interest (from

Chapter 1 Historical Video Games and Teaching Practices

21

75.8% to 78.9%). However, the difference between the two groups is small, and the changes are not significant, although the number of students expressing ‘much or great’ interest is visibly higher in the post-test among students in the experimental group, as shown in the following table (Table 1.2). Table 1.2: Percentage of students’ interest in Ancient Egyptian history according to their group. PRE-TEST

POST-TEST

Control Experimental NO OR LITTLE INTEREST MUCH OR GREAT INTEREST

. .

. .

Control Experimental . .

. .

In both groups, the number of students who care about knowledge of Ancient Egypt is greater after the study than before (Table 1.3). In total, the proportion of those who believe they know little about Ancient Egypt went down from more than half (51.4%) to just over one-third (34%), the difference in the proportion of interest between groups then changed to 8.5% in the post-test from 1.8% in the pre-test. However, we should note that to the question: ‘Since the beginning of the year, have you consulted a book, a documentary (TV, YouTube, etc.), a popular magazine, etc., about history?’ only 30% of the participating students responded in the affirmative, suggesting that students generally do not consult scholarly or popular literature in history either out of interest or obligation. Table 1.3: Impressions of possessing knowledge of Ancient Egypt, by percentage.

No or little knowledge Average knowledge Much or extensive knowledge

Pre-test

Post-test

. . .

. . .

The importance of these results is reinforced by the fact that most students believe they acquired knowledge, as demonstrated by Table 1.4.

22

Marc-André Éthier and David Lefrançois

Table 1.4: Impressions of having acquired knowledge of Ancient Egypt during the course or study, by percentage. Control Group

Experimental Group

 

 

Yes No

Dependent Variables If we compare the two tables below, we see that the proportion of students giving correct answers increased significantly in both groups, as we move from a negative asymmetry of scores in the pre-test (Table 1.5) to a positive asymmetry in the post-test (Table 1.6), but this positive asymmetry was more marked in the control group than in the experimental group. Table 1.5: Score on declarative knowledge questions, pre-test. 60 50 Control

40 30

10 Group

Frequency

20 0 60 50

Experimental

40 30 20 10 0

–2

0

2 4 6 Score on declarative knowledge questions

8

23

Chapter 1 Historical Video Games and Teaching Practices

Table 1.6: Score on declarative knowledge questions, post-test. 40 30 Control

20

Group

Frequency

10 0 40 Experimental

30 20 10 0

0

2

8 4 6 Score on declarative knowledge questions

10

7 Age Scores In Table 1.7, there is a drop in the scores according to age because two groups were formed with respect to this variable: the 12- and 13-year-old pupils have similar scores (below the threshold of 2.25, in the pre-test, and under 4.5 in the posttest) that are distinct from those of the students aged 14 to 17 (above 2.25 in the pre-test, and above 5.5 in the post-test).

Rate of Correct Answers According to Table 1.8, all the participants improved their scores. More students in the teacher-led course (control group) improved their scores, from 22% to 51%, while the experimental group’s scores went from 21% to 44%. This represents an increase of 29 and 23 percentage points respectively, increasing the gap between the groups from 1 percentage point to 7 percentage points in favor of the control group.

24

Marc-André Éthier and David Lefrançois

Table 1.7: Average score on declarative knowledge questions, pre-test.

Average score on declarative knowledge questions (pretest)

3,00 2,75 2,50 2,25 2,00 1,75

12 years old

13 years old

15 years old

14 years old

16 years old

17 years old

Age

Table 1.8: Average score on declarative knowledge questions, post-test.

Average score on declarative knowledge questions (post-test)

6,5

6,0

5,5

5,0

4,5

4,0 12 years old

13 years old

14 years old

Age

15 years old

16 years old

17 years old

Chapter 1 Historical Video Games and Teaching Practices

25

Table 1.9: Comparison of the rate of correct answers (of both groups) for the pretest and post-test, as a percentage.

Control Group (n=) Test Group (n=)

Pre-test

Post-test

% %

% %

8 Analysis We first note that the assumption that students would increase their score on a fact-based questionnaire with the historical video game has been verified. However, the increase did not surpass that of the control group: on the contrary. According to explanatory or predictive statistics, gender does not predict results (p>0.05). The place of residence (indicated by zip code) does not do so either (and it is an unreliable measure according to our observations, because the students did not know their zip code) (p>0.05). The motivation expressed does not predict the result (p>0.05). However, age predicts results (the students between 14 and 17 showed a more marked increase in their scores), and the result of the pre-test predicts the result in the post-test (the higher the scores are initially, the greater the increase) (p