Success with Simulation

Ms. U is a secondary world history teacher who is about to begin a unit on World War II. She has decided to take a totally new approach to the unit and base the instruction on a World War II simulation program that has recently been offered for free to schools, Making History: The Calm and the Storm. This simulation is a "turn-based" game in which pairs or small groups of students play the role of one of eight nations. In each turn, they need to make industrial, military and diplomatic decisions and history is modifiable based on those decisions. This award-winning software is already in use in hundreds of schools around the globe and Mrs. U is hoping that it will provide students with deeper insights into international issues and relationships than the textbook she has used in the past.

Ms. U introduces the simulation to the class and allows the students to choose the nations that they would most like to guide through the game. She finds that she needs to do a bit of "arm-twisting" to find students to play the roles of the eventual losers of the war, but reminds students that the outcome in a simulation depends on the decisions made and might not be the same as the historical outcome.

In addition to reading the background materials that are included with the game, Ms. U requires the students to communicate outside of school as they make the decisions for the next day's game turns. Ms. U's class has been using the Web-based classroom management site Edmodo for several years now. Each "country" establishes a team in Edmodo where they can communicate, share documents and maintain a group calendar. Edmodo has an app as well, allowing students to communicate on their smartphones outside of school. For the few students who don't have phones, Ms. U checks out tablets from the classroom collection for the duration of the unit.

The unit begins and each country is assigned a laptop on which to enter their game turn during the class period. Ms. U is a bit nervous in the first couple of days. Some of the teams arrive seeming unprepared and, by reviewing the communications in Edmodo from the evening before, Ms. U finds little evidence that they are communicating. Then Poland makes its move. During the evening of the second day, Poland quietly contacted the United Kingdom and forged a new alliance. In research that the members of the Polish team had done in the first two days, they discovered that the UK was sympathetic to their cause and even allowed for an exile government after the German occupation. They pressed this relationship to create a stronger alliance prior to the threatened German attack. This raises the stakes on Germany as they move forward with plans to occupy Poland and, suddenly, interest and levels of participation in the game explode. Ms U was surprised both by the amount of communication in Edmodo each evening and by the level of sophistication of the analysis being expressed. One of the students had even invited a local history buff to join their conversation when they believed they needed more information than the game materials provided! Several students asked to check out tablets because the amount of time spent communicating on the smartphones was straining their eyes. With access to all of the messages, Ms U notices that all but a few students are actively contributing. She conferences with these students to build their confidence and remove any roadblocks to participation.

A week into the unit, one of the students suggests that Ms. U might want to subscribe to the Twitter feed #SimGermany. She finds that the German team has begun tweeting the news from their teams point of view. Other nation-teams are following suit. "#SimGermany: "Winter has come to this stinking nation! All may be lost on this front!" is the first Tweet that she reads.

On the final exam for the World War II unit, submitted electronically on the classroom Edmodo site, the quality of the essays that students write demonstrate a level of insight and depth of understanding that Ms. U has not seen before. It seems to her to be more at the level of graduate students than secondary. Prodded by students previously disinterested in history, she begins to search for additional simulations for the other periods in her curriculum.

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