Those same students all said that it had quickly become obvious that they wouldn’t be able to keep up. Reason 2: Students dropped for the right reason. And, further to ease my mind, an old veteran of no fewer than three previous Project ΑΡΧΑΙΑ courses joined the course to escape from a terrible traditional one. Three of them emailed me to say specifically that they wish they could take the course not a single one told me that it was the game-based format that made them drop (though of course this is an argument ex silentio and I’m sure some at least were in fact put off by the format the absence of strident anti-game-based complaints, though, is something). Reason 1: Dropping students expressed regret. Now that I’m done with the design of the course and the materials, and the operatives (aka students) are busily involved in trying to figure out what τὸ μυστήριον (the mystery-thing) is, it seems like a good time to make an update, and to share some thoughts on how the course is going.įirst, the apparent bad news: more than half the students dropped the course in the first week.īut although I’ll admit my vanity is wounded, that bad news is in fact good news in disguise, for three reasons. Operation ΜΗΝΙΣ is a practomimetic transformation of my course Classics and Ancient Mediterranean Studies 1101 Greek Civilization. Exams, for example, become boss-fights papers become mission briefings. The “practomimetic principle,” as I call it, which plays an essential role in every one of our “operations” (courses/games), proposes that instructional designers can and should map play objectives (or victory conditions, if you will) onto learning objectives in a 1:1 relationship, thereby turning learning activities into game mechanics. As readers of Play the Past know, the brand of game-based learning in cultural heritage (and other) fields on which my UConn team and I are working is something we call “ practomimetic learning,” based on my formulation of the fundamental identity between stories and games.
JFK RELOADED EXACT REENACTMENT UPDATE
This post is a reflective update on the course I was feverishly developing all this past year (and which I teased here a couple months back), Operation ΜΗΝΙΣ.
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