A Historical Text-Based Game Designed to Develop Critical Thinking Skills

Introduction

The aim of the work described here was to develop a game harnessing game-based learning (GBL) principles to strengthen critical thinking (CT) skills and dispositions in the context of the discipline of history.

The experience shared in this report makes two contributions to the existing literature on GBL. The first crucial differentiator is the employment of the Reflective Practitioner model of behaviour (Schon, 1984) in the context of a GBL-based CT intervention. The insight Schon brings is that because practitioners learn by drawing on previous experience, then a game explicitly designed to boost CT skills and dispositions in a practitioner could form part of that experience.

Second is the key theoretical link between the idea of internal motivation as expressed by Malone (1980) as a factor which encourages people to play games and the idea of motivation as a set of consistent internal behaviours described by Facione (2000) in the context of developing CT skills. Most academic work which discusses GBL and CT together highlights the advantages games offer to skills development but somewhat neglect the equally important side of CT dispositions (see McCall, 2013 and 2016, for a review of such literature in the field of history).