Teaching with games: medieval culture and interactive fiction
A Gettysburg College literature professor is teaching medieval culture using computer games. Within his rich Medieval Atlantic Web site, professor Christopher Fee's students have written interactive fiction games to describe Icelandic tales, Norse myth, and archaeological site. This practice supports classes like English 401: Viking Studies
.
For example, this page contains and links to information about the Lindisfarne priory. A student can absorb that information, then play this student-authored game, which offers an adventure story tracing a path through sites and myth. A quiz that lets the learner assess their progress.
Professor Fee makes available links to several free, downloadable, and often open source resources, including the Inform 7 interactive fiction authoring tool,
Interactive fiction (sometimes "IF") is a form of text-based computer gaming dating back to the 1970s.
Professor Fee also showcased is work at the 2008 NITLE Summit.
Comments:
Of the four dozen or sites in the total project, nearly half--almost all of the sites in Viking Britain--have live IF games; the selection on the Isle of Man is especially good, so one might wish to start there. Most of those sites have relevant images/panos, video clips, and student-generated text reports, as well as the IF games; the idea is that a visitor to the site can glean the relevant information through any or all of these resources, and an on-line quiz is provided for each site so that such a visitor can self-assess how well he or she has absorbed the most important facts and themes. In addition, a key pedagogical constituency includes those students who learn by researching the sites and composing the reports, games, and quizzes. The complete project description is available here:
http://public.gettysburg.edu/~cfee/MedievalNorthAtlantic/
I suggest this portal for direct access to the project:
http://public.gettysburg.edu/~cfee/MedievalNorthAtlantic/index970x650.html
Simply use the map to navigate to the sites on the Isle of Man; Andreas, Cronk ny Merriu, Knockadoone, Maughold, and Peel are probably especially worth a look, but you be the judge of that and please feel free to get back to me with your impressions. The games are in their first iteration, but you'll get the idea, I think!
Alternatively, you can just go play the games, although I do NOT recommend this approach, which does not provide the context of the site reports, documentary clips, and quizzes, and thus is unmoored from the learning tools and pedagogical goals of the project:
http://public.gettysburg.edu/~cfee/courses/English4012001/topic3.htm#target two
They'll be alot more up--especially concerning non-Viking sites--in the next six months.
Comment by Christopher Fee [Visitor] 
· http://public.gettysburg.edu/~cfee/ 05/10/08 @ 13:57
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