Greek historians course as RPG

[Roger Travis]

Transformed by my contacts on the one hand with instructional designers and on the other with game designers, I'm on the verge of turning my upcoming course on Herodotus and Thucydides into a role-playing "game" (work on doing something similar with a Latin 1 course is also proceeding), wherein students play as students at a State U (similar to their own State U) who are asked to travel in time and space to ancient Athens and to save Western Civilization by interpreting Herodotus and Thucydides to people like Pericles and Plato.

I've been very interested to hear from colleagues who have used RPG's as class activities; I'm wondering if anyone has heard of anything on a larger scale, or if anyone has done game-activities that might intersect with the "game" I'm putting together.

[April]

So, are you doing something like a mock-trial, so to speak? When I was in high school, we did a mock Congress to debate the secession question.

[Roger Travis]

Mock-trial and mock-congress are definitely "game" activities that anticipate the kind of thing I'm interested in doing. In fact, one of the things I'm contemplating happening in my historians course (one of the "quests," that is, from an RPG perspective) is a murder trial, to demonstrate what an Athenian would have understood by the word histor and its derivatives. The central idea is that the whole course will be a quest to figure out what each student (informed, by the end of the course, about what we know of them and of their context) thinks Herodotus and Thucydides were doing, in the context of 5th C. BCE Athens.