Gamifying History

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We built an educational video game with secondary teachers to improve the teaching of the Industrial Revolution to KS3-4 students. It was designed as an in-class learning module with lesson plans, activities, and homework support. We want to offer it as an app at a low cost to all schools in the country. If successful, we will develop games for other subjects/periods. More broadly, we hope to change the way games are used in classroom teaching.Fewer students are now taught the pivotal role of the Industrial Revolution. This is mostly because teachers and students find the data-intensive literature too challenging and dry. Students also struggle to synthesise and analyse multiple factors and their influence on each other. This problem has been observed in both classroom discussions and written assessments, where students tend to describe isolated events rather than provide a holistic understanding of the causes and consequences. Targets: KS3-4-students; teachers.The game was jointly designed by secondary schoolteachers and university lecturers and is based on state-of-the-art research conducted at Cambridge and elsewhere. It fosters independent learning by allowing students to explore causal relationships within a sandbox environment. Unlike standalone gamified activities, it features a series of interconnected lessons, challenges, and multimedia resources that engage students in a continuous learning journey. This cohesive approach ensures that the game remains pedagogically sound and aligns with learning objectives.We draw on state-of-the-art historical research produced at Cambridge on occupational change (Shaw-Taylor and Wrigley 2014; Litvine and Shaw-Taylor 2022), demographic growth (Wrigley 1997, 2004), the role of natural endowments (Wrigley 2010), and historical transport networks (Bogart et al. 2021; Litvine et al. 2023), documenting and explaining economic growth in Britain. This project also brings together new methods in digital geospatial humanities developed in a series of other research projects led by the applicant at Cambridge, and a practical and theoretical engagement with game development from the University of Salford.We also draw directly on the research carried out by the applicant. The core of the data used for the game is the result of our work (jointly with others) over the last five years at the Cambridge Group for the History of Population & Social Structure. Finally, the game offers an approach to the Industrial Revolution based on the long-term evolution of living standards and population growth.