 OK, I hope everybody can hear me. My name is Carl Blythe. I'm the director of Coral, the Center for Open Educational Resources and Language Learning at the University of Texas at Austin. And I'm really happy today to be introducing Terry Nelson, who's a professor of French at Cal State San Bernardino, because I find that her project is really terrific and that she's really terrific, too. She's a really engaging personality. And I met Terry last year, last May, at the Calico Conference. Calico stands for Computer Assisted Language Instruction Consortium. And it's a group of, I would say, computer nerds and foreign language teachers who are showing their cool new projects. And Terry really blew me away with what she's going to be showing us today. Her video game, a role-playing game called Paris Occupé, a slice of life during World War II when Paris is being occupied. And so much is going on in the capital, the black market, the resistance, rationing, famine. The students learn so, so much from playing this game. But I just want to say, one of the things that I liked in particular about Terry was that she, like many people, are kind of self-taught. She's learning how to do this. And I was really impressed, kind of, by her gumption. And she'll be talking more about how do you do this when you're not a programmer. That's something that's very important to learn. Just not to be afraid and to kind of dig in. And that's really the biggest takeaway I can say from that I got from watching her presentation at Calico is really inspiring. So I hope to inspire you today. And I'm going to turn it over in just a second to Terry. But I do want to mention that we have another webinar tomorrow in the afternoon at 3 PM. And so if you haven't registered, please go to our website and do that. And that's called, that's another project called the Foreign Language and the Literary in the Everyday. It's called flight.flite.org. But today it's going to be Occupied Paris Creating a Virtual Learning Experience. So let me turn it over to Terry. Terry, it's all yours. Thank you, Carl, for such a nice introduction. I approached Carl because I was looking for a way to share some information about this project. I was enjoying some of the things that I was seeing happening with my students. So I thank the Coral team for all of their help in allowing me to bring this to you. I'm guessing the sound is OK. Can you just somebody type something in one of the chat windows for me? We're good. OK, great. So we do have a questions over in the sidebar. That's the participant chat. So as you have questions, go ahead and ask them. I will try to get to them as I can. There will certainly be time at the very end. And Natalie's going to help out and keep track of the questions. So if I don't catch it because I'm too busy talking, just go ahead and know that she's catching those. And I will get to them eventually. So my project is called Occupied Paris, or Paris Occupé. And I started it, oh, gosh, about three or four years ago. I spent a lot of time doing research in it first. And I was looking for something kind of to cap my career, something I was really passionate about, that I'd always kind of wanted to do. And this ended up being it. I'm nowhere near done. What you're going to see are the results from two pilot tests. I have tested three chapters, one of the chapters twice. So let's just get started. So I'm working with a game platform called Eris. And you can go to eriskames.org. It is a free, open source authoring program. It's pretty easy to learn how to use. You can do a lot with it fairly quickly. You do need to know that right now it is working only on iOS devices, though I have heard that the Foreign Language Research Center up in Oregon is working on an Android. The game is designed for mobile place-based gaming. That is, it's designed so that students or users take out an iPad or an iPhone and walk around. And as they're walking around, they can be doing a scavenger hunt. They can have some media from other time periods. They can be set kind of as if they were in another time. They can do tours. It also works with QR codes, so like museums and a lot of historical sites are using it. I'm clearly not using it the way it was designed. I am using it for historical, but my students, unfortunately, are not in Paris when they're using it. But something about being on the map and clicking on things, and you'll see that, let's them feel like they've actually transported themselves someplace else. So I'll take you first through. I'm going to talk to you a little bit about my project goals. I'll show you how the game is set up in Eris. And then I'm going to show you the results from some of the pilot tests in terms of what my students were able to do. So here's a picture of one of my students who was working with Eris. And this was actually in a history of Paris class. I actually taught the students how to use Eris and took me about an hour. And here he is working with his iPad, his MacBook, and his iPhone. And lest we be concerned that this is only for the young, this is a retired educator who went back to college to get a degree in French because he'd always wanted to. So Paris 1939 to 1947, obviously an extremely complicated time period. And not only is the time period complicated, which I think makes it interesting, but I've always kind of struggled with my students and their desire to simplify this whole time period. And to think about things in terms of villains and heroes that there are good guys and bad guys, and they would have been a resistant and everything would have worked out fine, which is great for a two-hour Hollywood movie, but really doesn't get into the importance of the time period. So we think about France in this time period as having three governments that there's the part which is green, which is Vichy France in the south, which Vichy is the town where the government was located, with Pétain as the leader, and the yellow zone, which is the zone occupied by the Germans. However, these two zones are actually the same country because Pétain is the leader of both parts of the country, though the southern part of France has some independence in terms of their rule. And then we have sitting on top of that, we have Charles de Gaulle and the Frey French forces fighting along with the Allied forces. So this is already just at the outset, really hard for students to understand. So they get very confused. So looking at that, and then looking at the other part that they're having a hard time understanding, and it's their sense of stories and narratives in history. So students have a real strong desire to have a sense of an ending. They like novels, they like things that we talk about Disney movies, everything gets wrapped up with a pretty bow at the end, and that is counter indicative for what we know about history because history doesn't just stop. We don't have that culminating experience with something. We do have the end of the war, though it's not as abrupt and as festive as one might think. And if we look at World War II in particular in France, afterwards there were a lot of things that happened that weren't pretty. There were things like the reprisals, there were random acts of violence. And so trying to get students to understand that in the time period, things aren't as easily understood as they appear to be through their knowledge, through history or through movies or books is something I really wanted them to get, to have some sort of empathy for that. And then there are of course all of the ethical dilemmas of this time period. What does it mean to be a patriot? Is it someone who fights with Pétain and the French government? Is it somebody who goes to England and fights with De Gaulle? Is it somebody who acts as a resistant? Or is it somebody who collaborates? And then there's the question of the Holocaust and the deportation. And then finally that whole sense of hindsight it's easy for us to say now what was the thing that people should have done, but what was it like for people in that time period to really think about it? So my project goals here were threefold. One was obviously as a French professor, linguistic development, but most importantly in a meaningful setting. We know from Actful how important it is for students to have a reason to use language. And so for me this historical setting was one that was really meaningful. Then secondarily I wanted them to have a deeper understanding of historical events, that sort of depth versus breadth. I wanted them to have that sort of empathy for a historical time period and understanding how difficult it was for people living then to make choices and to make the right choices. And for me that really fosters critical thinking. And then finally ethical development in young adults. Something that we don't always think about when we're teaching, but for those of us who are teaching in high school and university, these are really important ages for students to be thinking about what should they do. These are the questions that they're interested in, that they're curious in, they're really developing their sense of self and that is their relationship to the rest of the world. So I thought that that was extremely important to give them the opportunity to role play and to try things out and see what fits with who they are. So the game itself will hopefully eventually have 12 chapters ranging from 1939 during the Draldegaard to 1947 so that it covers the two years of that post-war period. Each chapter will consist of regular requirements, things like food, work, information, getting news, and then also special quests tied to that chapter. Each one has money, that having some funds to disperse is really important for the gameplay. It also has safety, health and score features and I'll talk about those as we go on. And then there are a number of random elements that make the game different for each student so that it's not just everybody having the exact same thing happen to them. And then I have students reflecting on their choices throughout the game and then outside of the game in class activities using audio, video and text. So this is a little bit of an outline of the chapters that I've got done, which are in yellow. So the first one that I have is June 1940, that's when the Nazis invade France and in this particular chapter of this game, the students need to learn to gather information through media sources. There are also a number of tutorial elements in each chapter that allow them to, so they can be played independently. And their special quest is to decide whether to stay in Paris or to leave Paris. Then the second chapter that I've completed is December 1940, which is a chapter on rationing and their special quest is to prepare a meal for Christmas. This is a chapter I've pilot tested twice. Let's see the introductory screens for those, which kind of set the stage for the students. And then the third chapter that I've been working on is August 1941, which is when things really start to move in terms of resistance activities. We see the first executions taking place. Pétain, the leader of France, has something he calls the Révolution Nationale. He wants to change the government and really starts talking about the decade of resistance of France that led to the defeat against the Nazis. So this is what the game looks like. First character creation. It is a role-playing game. So the first thing that I have the students do is to create their character. Here you can see a Cacti d'Entité that one of my students went ahead and took and then altered to create his character. I believe strongly in that sense of interactive and collaborative storytelling where the game provides some information to the students, but they co-create by adding their own personal touches to it. And by creating their own character, choosing a picture, putting it in an old Cacti d'Entité really allows them to have this sense of how they're going to play the game. And it's also really nice because that fictional identity gives them a sense of safety so they can choose to do bad things. But it's not them, it's just the role-play. And I think it's important for students to have that opportunity to try out different things and to see what fits and to not be held responsible for that as a real person, but just as a role-play. So here's an example from another student. She played her character as Giselle Dupont. And you can see that she created a whole backstory to Giselle is, what she was like. They had a little Google form that they had to choose like their three most important traits and their three faults of character and the kinds of things that they thought were the most important and then use those to write the story of their character. Well, look at the game layout. We're gonna look at it each feature of Eris. So here's a picture of some of my students working. Because it was still being pilot tested, they played the game mostly in my presence so that I could troubleshoot when there were problems and there were obviously problems. It's a complex game and there's some things that I didn't program well, but they were pretty willing to go along with it. So we'll look first at the map. So when you're in Eris because it's all based on a map, this is what it looks like and the user can go ahead and turn off, it's based on Google Maps. So they could have the street map view or the aerial view, which of course is for Paris today not Paris back then, but it allows them to situate themselves in space. The next thing that they have is quests. Actually, let me get back to this. So the way that you do any interaction is you look at the map and then you click on something and I'll show you a little video in just a few minutes and then that creates, you go to a place. Something happens there. The second thing that we have are the quests. And so in the quest, those are really ways of guiding students out to particular tasks that they need to accomplish. So you can see here, these are three different tasks from the chapter on rationing. In the first one, it's saying what the instructions are in terms of what you have to do on a daily basis. The second one is about the Christmas dinner. And then the Christmas dinner is broken down itself into numerous quests, for example, the fish course. So in this game, students go and collect their ration coupons from the town hall and then they have to, they have one week to go out and find the food and buy the food and wait in the lines and try to get the best things that they can for their meal. Characters or players have attributes. So you can see some of the attributes here. It tells you what time of day it is, what day of the week it is. The J1 SAFARMA is did they actually pick up the newspaper? They're required to pick up the newspaper or listen to the radio every day. Their health score, their security score, and then this person has already put one cheese in their cheese plate for the dinner. This is another aspect of ERIS. You'll often hear things like this called a backpack or an inventory. And an inventory seems like a super simple thing, but what it really does is allows you to transmit a lot of information. So this is from the chapter on June 1940. And students have to decide whether they're going to or the players have to decide whether they're going to stay in Paris or leave. If they decide to leave, they have to pack their suitcase and their suitcase is based on weight. So they're only allowed to have so much weight in that suitcase. And you can see here, this is where they choose very simple activity. You have to choose what to put in your suitcase. And so you can see here, this is the first side is the cursor guy. The first list is what to pack. And this is the interaction in the game. The second one is their inventory, where they are, you can see what they have in their suitcase. And then in the third column, you can see some of the pictures. So each item in the inventory, when they click on it, they can get information. So you can see things like pictures of what shoes look like from that time, what a Boiton Conceve is. It's food that's been canned. And then the bottle of water, and that was really surprising to them because they didn't think of water coming in a glass bottle. They thought water came in plastic bottles. So there were a lot of them who were quite shocked that water used to come in glass bottles. And then because that water in the glass bottle weighed a lot, a lot of them didn't put food into their suitcase, much like the Parisians who left Paris. And then they found themselves, they thought, oh, they'll just get food along the way. And then they got out on the road and found out that all the stores are closed and all the restaurants are closed and they had nothing to eat. So their health scores went down. Note-taking, you can take notes and errors. You can take written notes, audio notes. You can take a picture and put that in there and you can take a quick video. So students did that. We use that primarily for quick information. And then we're using a Blackboard Learning Management System. So I had them do their diaries out on Blackboard. You could also use something like WordPress. They had two diary entries per day of the game. One was the diary of what happened, what their character did that they needed to personalize. And then the second diary had to be a news diary. They had to talk about what was happening in town based on the news that they had gotten. So here are a couple of examples. I've left all of the little student mistakes in there so that you'll know it's legit. So the first one, you can see a student writing about leaving Paris. And then in the second one, a student who was commenting on things that they found in the newspaper. So when I was doing a faculty institute earlier this fall and I was talking about my project and we had a feedback board, somebody wrote up on my feedback board. So what does this have to do with learning French? Good question. So this is what it has to do with learning French. The game is really scaffolding linguistic performance. The game has aspects of interpretive skills, both in the gameplay and then also the historical media we used in class. Interpersonal skills, the forums, the chats and the in-class discussions. And then presentational skills through their videos, their audio presentations, their in-class presentations. And then most importantly, the written work that they've been doing in terms of their diaries for what's going on. So let me show you some of the things that were going on. So interpretive, historical information. Within the game, students have to access the newspapers or the radio every single day. There are also extracts from memoirs, biographies, novels. There are links to clips, film clips from the time period, especially newsreels. You heard some of the music when we were starting up and that was music from the 1940s. And then we also had in-class regular sessions where we were looking at pieces of novels, biographies. We watched a lot of documentaries from French TV. So basically the game, I mean, if I had to really say what it is, I would never tell my students this. But basically the game is just a multimedia textbook where you get to make a lot of choices. Like you choose to, you know, which chapters you read or you're not gonna read. This one is just really a big multimedia textbook. But you know, I couch it in a game so it seems like more fun. So here's some examples. Introduction. So this is from a chapter and it is telling students, it's giving them information about what's going on. So this week of the game starts on the 12th of June 1940 and it gives them a little bit of history and then it goes on and leads them to a newsreel clip from the news that used to be shown in the movie theaters. Here's some other examples. Every day of the game starts with some kind of information. This is a, the first column is a little bit of an extract from a, not a novel diary by Marguerite Bloch. And then the second one is just some information about one of the little towns that they go through on the, if they choose to leave Paris. Okay, so here's a little video of what it looks like in the game. So the student is on the map and you can see that this is their invention inventory and in their inventory they can go, so when you go to the kiosk and you have an interaction with the vendor at the kiosk, you can choose which newspaper to buy and it of course costs you one franc and when you click on that, when you make that transaction, you are taken to the Gadica site, which is the Bibliothèque Nationale de France, the French National Library and it takes you actually to the newspaper for that particular day. So what's really interesting is that the students now actually read it, whereas if I just told them to go see the newspaper from that day and just provided them with a link, they wouldn't do it, but now because it's in the game, it really makes it feel as if something really happened. So I'm gonna switch that out. Let's come back to our presentation. And so the students actually are using resources that are out on the web and going back to historical resources from that particular time period. Here's another thing that they can do when they are in their house, Cheval. They can choose to listen to the radio and they have two choices on the radio. They can choose to listen to the BBC or they can listen to Radio Paré. Now if they choose to listen to the BBC, they are warned that they will lose security points because this is forbidden and if they continue to go on, then their security score will go down. They can also choose to listen to Radio Paré. It was really interesting when I pilot tested this with the students, I had, and you can see it here in the display, I had one student come back to class and she told me, she said, Madam, there's a problem with the radio link. And I said, well, what were you listening to? And she said, well, I listened to the BBC but there was all of this noise and it wasn't a very clear signal. And she didn't understand static. Students aren't used to having static on the radio and so she was really surprised and so I had to explain to her that this was very common that static in a radio was what people lived with on a regular basis. When students click on these links, they actually go just like the newspaper goes to particular newspapers that were available in the day and we do have the students research the political slant of the different newspapers that they're looking at. When they go to the news of the day, if it's Radio Paré, it will either take them to something that was actually playing that night in Radio Paré from the newspapers will tell me what they were playing each day. Or it'll take them to the number one song from that week in Paris. And then the same thing with the BBC, it is leading them to actual news broadcasts. So if they listen to the news broadcast on December 25th of 1940, they actually get the news broadcast from that day. So it gives them that sense of being in time. Okay, let's see if this little video works better. All right, so this is a video of what's happening when they go to the butcher shop. Okay, so you can see that they click on the link to the butcher shop. And it says, the butcher says, what can I do for you today? And then you can say, oh, well, do you not have anything special? And the butcher will say, oh, I can't even find chocolate. And then the player can answer. And eventually what happens is the butcher says, you know, I wish I had good, I had cousins living in the country, then I would have some food. It's just really bad with the rationing. If only I had some chocolate. Now, after this, if the student goes out and they find chocolate, which they can find on certain days in one of the APSRI, there's also one of the Boulangerie Patisserie that has chocolate, but only for a couple of hours during one of the days. So if they actually go out and they find that chocolate and they bring it back to the butcher, then the butcher will give them some roast beef, which makes for a really good Christmas celebration. It's not as good as a turkey. Turkeys were only available for one day for a couple of hours. But if they can find it, then they get that roast beef. Now, what was interesting with this is that I asked the students when we finished with this chapter and I said, did you ever go to the black market? Did you ever use the black market? And the students said, oh no, madam, we couldn't find the black market. And I said, well, what do you mean find the black market? And they said, well, it wasn't anywhere on the map. So they thought that the black market was a place that you went to. And they didn't understand that the black market is actually an exchange. So once we started talking and they found out, oh, one of them had found the chocolate and they'd given it to the butcher and had gotten this extra treat, then they started to really understand what the black market was. They had no idea before then. All of the archival work, I did all of that myself. So I've tried really hard to make sure that all of the information is accurate historically. So when they're in this chapter, if they go to any of the stores, the food that's available is the food that was actually available that day in the stores. The newspapers print a list of what was found at Léal, which was a central marketplace in Paris at the time. And so the newspapers published that every day. I also researched the cost of all of the food. I had to make a guess for how long the line was in different stores, but all of that is as historically accurate as I can make it. So interpretive and interpersonal, it's really important for the students to have that sense of player agency. So as I said, they lose points for certain things. And my goal is that I want to have those scores kind of add up as they play through the game so that let's say that they have safety points by following the rules and listening only to the hadu of France and doing everything as they're supposed to be doing, then when it gets to post-war, that would actually be a liability rather than a positive things. So that students are getting that sense of they were following the rules, they were obeying the laws, they were doing what they needed to do, which a lot of them started to do. They got really upset by that curfew, making them going back to home. And if they stayed out after curfew, they got thrown in jail. And they really didn't like that at all. And they had a lot of discussion about what that was like and how that felt. The game also has a lot of interactions with different kinds of players. So here's one from the June 1940. It says you see your boss a little bit further away and you can go talk to your boss. You can also go talk to your neighbor. Now you had a fight with your neighbor a couple of days ago. And if you decide to go talk to your neighbor, and you're nice enough to have packed water and then you give your neighbor some water, they are at the Gardelillon, then the neighbor will actually give you good information about the trains, which aren't running. However, if you go and talk to your neighbor and you don't offer your neighbor something, then the neighbor is going to give you really bad info and kind of ruin you for, because it'll make you wait in line for a really long time. And then all of the other options are kind of disappearing from you. I'm gonna skip this slide. So here's some examples from student journals from that day, their diaries. I like this one from, this is from the 20th of December and it says, you know, the lines, the lines, the lines, life is nothing but lines anymore. And one of the things that was, I thought was good was when we were having the discussion in class after the game was over and I asked for some feedback and they said, well, they didn't like waiting on all those lines that that was really a waste of time and why did they have to do this? And then as we started to deconstruct it and they realized that this is actually what life was like. So that sense of they were losing time by waiting in the lines was problematic for them during the game, but was actually historically something that was really true and they realized that if both people, they always play as a couple, their character has a partner and that somebody in the couple has to be in lines every day or they won't have enough food. So interpersonal, when we were playing the rationing game, as we got done with the rationing game and I was asking them questions about what had happened and one of the things that I asked them, I said, well, the game calculates how many calories of food that you bought during the week and you need to have 2,400 calories per day to be able to maintain your weight, so it's a health issue. And I asked the students, well, did you use all of your ration coupons? Oh no, they didn't use all their ration coupons because they couldn't, there was too long of lines or they decided to go work or they decided to do other things. And then I asked them, well, how many calories did you have for that week? And like, oh, well, you know, I only had so many calories and they said, well, what would happen? And they said, oh, I'd get really skinny. It's like, well, okay, that's a low level response. So then what we did was we went back in, in class and we started to really write out, I had them write out, what did they eat every day? And they had to write their puti de chine, their de chine and their dine and write down what they ate based on how much food that they had bought. And then they started to realize this was really problematic, there was not enough food. Until they wrote it down, they really didn't understand that. So I let them go back and they could add food for any ration coupons that they had left and they added it all up. And they started to realize that this was really problematic, that there wasn't enough food that people were going to get sick. I then pulled up the list of who, how many ration coupons different people got. So we looked at children and children got fewer calories per day and they thought that made sense because kids are littler. And then we looked at nursing women and nursing women could have milk, they had coupons for milk and they understood that. And then we looked at the elderly and the daily calorie ration for an elderly person was 670 calories a day. And one of the students said, they're killing off the old people. And something changed in class. And at that moment, everything switched for them. All of a sudden, calories became a political issue and they started to talk about what this meant and was this a political strategy? And was this a choice that was made by the government on purpose? And they led themselves into a discussion about food security around the world. They started talking about Somalia. They started talking about other info of things that they'd been hearing in the news. That they're sort of in the background that they hadn't paid much attention to. You know, as a teacher, I was like, victory. This is exactly what I wanted them to do. But they needed to go through that whole process to really understand what was happening here. They led themselves to it. I just had them write their menus on the board, but something really switched. And Rebecca, her eyes filled up with tears when she started to talk about what was happening to the elderly people. And she told me at the end of class when we finished the whole quarter that that was the moment that everything changed for her. That something just, it moved her so much. Her eyes were all filled up with tears. And even at the end of, which was like six weeks later, she said that changed everything. So it's not in the sense that this is teaching materials. It's something that you really have to work with the students for. They don't get it all on their own. They're still learning. They're still a role for teachers, even if you have games and other things that seem to take the students out independently. Here's a little clip from one of the, this is one of their follow-up surveys. And they were asked about different kinds of things. And one of the students was writing, and she said, when there's famine, there's no place for education in the absence of education. There's no progress. This leaves the country susceptible to economic downfall and also open to its enemies. So I thought that that was a really profound kind of observation for a student. Somebody asked about what level are the students? These were students who were majors in French. So they're juniors and seniors. The game can be scaffolded in a lot of different ways for different levels, I think. Though much of it is for really the students who are intermediate or above. Effective consequences. I figured out how to use some JavaScript, some programming language. So I created, as they are fleeing Paris in the June 1940 chapter, there were actually planes that flew over a certain area, the German planes at a certain day. And so if their character is in that place, at that time there's a random chance that they will get hit by a machine gun. They can regain some health with things like taking a nap. Of course, taking a nap is not going to help if you had a bullet in you. But they can try to regain some things if they have a first aid kit or other kinds of objects in their inventory, making it more game-like. And the players can actually get to a point where they have no health left and they die. At that point they have the choice of restarting the game. Or they can decide to create a new character. And in order to create a new character, they have to write their obituary and they have to then go through the process of creating a new character. This was a little bit controversial with some faculty, but I found that it was really realistic in terms of what was going on in the game. When we did this the first time, one of my students was a double major in history. He was a senior. He was finishing up his year. He was actually taking a class on World War II at the same time as he was taking this French class. And he just sort of stopped. They were playing the game in class and he sort of stopped and he slapped his knee and he's like, oh my gosh, I can't believe it. I died. And I just died. He was just in shock. And he was kind of laughing and we were talking about it in French about what was going on, what happened to him. And then I look over at this other student and she's not doing anything. She's just sitting there looking at her iPad. And this goes on for about five minutes. And finally I said to her, I said, Ashley, are you having a problem? And she said, I can't decide what to do. So we talked about what her choices were. And she finally just said, I don't want to die. So this kind of game of, game play where something really terrible can happen to you as it does in a lot of games, your character dies. You have to start over that level. That was really important to her to make the right choice. And she did make the right choice and then like 10 minutes later her character actually did die. So here's the little consequences. You died on the road. And then here you can see one of the students obituaries that he wrote for his character. So, presentational. What I like about the game or the different chapters of the game is in terms of the volume of language that's produced but also the way that we're able to use writing as a process. Students have their in-game journals that they do in Eris. Then they have their graded journals which they did on Blackboard. We also had post-game surveys which were actually homework assignments where I asked them questions about the game play. Sometimes I presented them with more information like in the chapter on rationing. I asked them, I gave them some pictures of what rationing was like two years later and asked them to comment on it. And then they also had a final essay and final project that they had to do. What was really curious to me was in an interesting kind of way is how they started to adopt some of the language that they were seeing in the game. Words that I wouldn't normally expect students to use and that I hadn't made any particular effort to teach them. There were no vocabulary lists but the students actually were coming up with these words on their own. So here's some examples from a student. This one is calling it student number one. I actually don't even remember which one this was. This student was actually in both pilots for the chapter on rationing. So here you can see in April, 2014, the question was this pregame question was what was life like during the occupation. Her pregame answer in April, 2014 was I think that life was very sad and strict and daily life was difficult because it was like living or walking on eggshells. April, 2015, she has a very similar answer pregame and then she has, you can see in the June, 2015, this is the post game and you can see her going into a lot more detail. This one, student number three, this is actually my student who was the double major in history. Oh no, this is a different one. I'm not sure which student this was but you can see just in terms of the volume of language in April, 2015, what was life like during the occupation, it was very difficult as opposed to what they wrote post game. Presentational, the students were consistently asked to explain their choices and describe the consequences of their actions. Their final paper was to tell me whether they thought their character was a bystander, collaborator, victim or resistant and why. So here's a question that I asked fairly regularly. Let's see if I can get that. She's students and they'd never seem to notice that I was asking them this question over and over so this is student one from both pilots. Your friend asked you to hide him or her what challenges does that pose? What do you decide to do and why? And you can see that in the beginning she said, oh, I'd hide my friend because this is unfair. By June, 2015 she's a little bit more, she's equivocating on that. I'm hoping that should something awful happen that she actually would help her friend out but I think that this is a sense where students are developing that sense of really what is at stake and thinking in a much more nuanced fashion about the consequences of the decisions that they make. Here's another one. This is my student who's a double history major and I asked what you decide to do and he just avoided the question. So he just said hypotheticals give me a headache. I don't know what I do. And this is the kind of response from students who don't wanna think at that level of critical thinking and also who maybe don't have the language to say what they want to say. And you can see and I only have a little piece of his argument from June, 2015. This went on for like four paragraphs that he was much more nuanced. Well, he actually answered the question at the end of the game. For their final projects, they tell the story of their character and then here's some information that students had about what did they learn in the chapter or what did they learn in the game? So here, what did I learn in the chapter? Life was very strict. You had a limit to everything that you can do and you can see them really integrating some of that knowledge about how challenging things were. How would you describe this class to a friend? And I really liked that part where it said that you could connect emotionally to the lives of people at that time. That's obviously something I was striving for. It felt really good to see that come out unsolicited in the student's response. Programming wish list. I have a lot of things I'd still like to do. Obviously, this is gonna take me a long time. I spend about two to 300 hours creating the first version of each of the chapters and then many, many hours going back and working with it. I'd like it eventually to generate a customized citation index with excerpts so that whatever the students decide in terms of how their game is played, that that would generate really a customized bibliography for that individual student. I'm trying to figure out how I can create secret letter boxes so that they're participating in resistance or secret activities that they can drop messages to each other and have that kind of play that is less parallel play. Right now, it's all parallel play. Each character just plays the game. They don't interact with each other within the game itself. And also that there are more varieties of characters for play so that I can have the students choose, you know, are they going to be a communist? Are they going to play it as a Jew? Are they going to play it as a collaborator that they can have more variety within their choices? So questions. Can anybody play this game? Right now it is closed to Cal State students. You have my email address and if you email me, I'm happy to send you a code. You have to enter the code to play the game and that's because it's still in development. It's not fully ready to go out. I would like to make this available for others to play and then also for others to customize the game play itself. I just had to figure out how to do that and then make sure that the materials that are in there are all copyright compliant. So right now there are a couple of photos in there that I feel comfortable using with just my own students for one shot but I'm not sure belong out in the public but if you're interested just contact me and I will share with you what I can. Are the pedagogical materials to help students feel in cultural and linguistic background? Yeah, I used, because I was teaching this in a class, I originally thought it's a 10 week quarter. I originally thought that I would cover 1939 to 1947 and we covered 1939 to 1941 in those 10 weeks. We watched a lot of videos. We did some discussions in class. They did some readings. So this is very much part of a class. It's not something that somebody just goes off and plays on their own. It's really support for a classroom and classroom interactions. I think I answered the question about working collaboratively and against each other, they really are playing parallel. So they are just, they are each making their own choices but they're not interacting with each other in the game. I have them playing the game within the class though it is designed so that they can actually play outside of class. I did it within class because it was, it was, it's new and there was some bugs in it and I wanted to address it and I also wanted to kind of see how they were playing it but a lot of them then went ahead and they replayed the chapters until they got the kind of score that they wanted to and they spent a lot of time outside of class playing it. See, when do they play the game? What does a regular class session look like? It depended on the day. There were some lectures, I gave some mini lectures. There were some videos. We read, we read some excerpts of novels and discussed them. So some of the things that we did were very, you know they would feel very comfortable and normal to you. They're learning curve of heiress. Heiress is super, super simple to use. Obviously what I have here is much more complicated than just basic use but you can learn how to use heiress in probably, you know an hour. There's some really good materials on there for you to figure out how to use it. There's some good workshop materials on the heiress sites and if you have the code, obviously you can play it. Again, you know, there's some things. So it's got some bugs. I just realized as I was opening it back up I haven't had a chance to get back to it for a couple of months. Heiress has made some things a lot better but I have to go back and tweak some of the things that I have in the game for it. And the students played the game. Each chapter took them about eight to 10 hours. So they spent quite a bit of time working through the materials and then they would go back to the materials and look at different things as they were writing their journals. If you use Heiress and yeah, the students could pair up. I was surprised. The first time I used it, we have an iPad cart. So I was able to bring iPads to class but many of my students had iPhones and they just downloaded it on their iPhones or they had iPads and then they played it on their own. Right now I have three chapters. One has been pilot tested twice and the other two have only gone through pilot testing once. The chapter on August 1941 after the game I asked the students, I didn't use points that time and they said that it would be better with points. So there's still some things that I would go back and fix before or change before I play it again. It's kind of hard to balance that sense of urgency and that sense of trying to win which is really important that engages them and to figure out how to put that in the historical context. So I struggle with that a little bit sometimes but the students give me a lot of great feedback. No Android yet. Julie Sykes is I heard working on developing an Android app. For assess the game, because I was using, this is Amanda's question, because I was using the game really to encourage the students to better understand what was happening. I looked at their scores but I really didn't grade them on their scores. We used a lot of the game activities as a prompt for discussions and as a workup towards more formal assignments. So this was much more formative assessment and then grades were more on assignments that they did later on in the course. So things like their final presentation or this they would get, we called them surveys at the end of each chapter where I would give them some new information and ask them to apply that to what they'd already known. There would be some points, some grading that happened there. So it was very much a support to understanding rather than the main grade in the class. But that's my own, you know, everybody, every teacher has their own way of engaging their students. In class we played, we had, I have class twice a week. It was for 10 weeks. So that makes 20 class sessions and we probably spent six class sessions using the game in class. We spent another six sessions, at least part of sessions, debriefing, what was going on, what's happening. Sometimes those were the same sessions we would do. They would play the game for a little while and then we would stop and work on what was going on. Philip's question about feedback from the students. Students gave me a lot of really good feedback about different kinds of things having the hours for certain stores posted on the door so that when they clicked on a store they could see what time and what days of the week that particular store was open. How to, the points, they really liked the points. That really motivated them. They liked having quests that were very specific about what they needed to do. They found that really helpful to kind of orient them in terms of their tasks to accomplish. Could the students build the game with you? Absolutely. I think that that stage of it to be able to delve into the history and then to be able to create their own scenarios, that's what I would really love to see them be able to do because then they're applying their knowledge to the situation. So that's really a higher level of critical thinking that I think would be really cool. I just would need, we're switching over to semesters in about four years. I think semesters will help a lot. It would need to be two classes in sequence. There needs to be enough time. We can't rush the students through this. It takes them a while to process this information. So I thank you all very, very much. I hope you found what you were looking for in the presentation that you got some ideas of things that you could do on your own. And I appreciate you coming into the webinar.