The origins of Making History

Making History is based on lessons from years of developing and testing interactive teaching experiences in both Virtual Reality and traditional web applications. With support of the University of California online program our PI developed a two-dimensional game (digitalzombies.ucr.edu), and an interactive teaching module in Virtual Reality (VR), which we prototyped and tested in four classes with several hundred students, before the pandemic short-circuited those efforts.  Through those modules, we were able to demonstrate the value of learning by doing and learning while playing.

Those early models taught us two things: 1) it is indeed possible to scale experiential learning that provides students with a unique and impactful learning experience; and 2) interactive VR is technically and financially impractical:  development is expensive, and hardware is expensive, ableist, and inevitably glitchy.   Even though the outcomes for students in VR are compelling, our PI could not foresee deploying the experience remotely, and expecting our students to invest in the technology and independently work around technical challenges.

In VR, the complications of the interface created a focus zone: students were performing unexpected tasks, in a vacuum, that by design required all of their attention. That focus was a valuable component of the learning in VR, and in Making History we explore alternative pathways to achieve that kind of focus. Early indications are that the community/shared/immediately visible components of Making History are achieving some of those results. There seems to be a productive tension in knowing that your work is immediately visible to your peers, which we hypothesize contributes to the efficacy of the platform.

Making History is the outcome of our attempt at operationalizing the VR successes in a two-dimensional, affordable, accessible, and flexible format.  It is an easy to use web app, that enables rapid and affordable iterative prototyping, and embeds student learning in a spatial framework.

Making History: in their own words (student feedback)

So far over 700 students have worked with Making History, providing initial validation that the platform supports better comprehension of core concepts (especially in large lecture classes where this is hard to gauge) as well as student-engagement. Making History leverages the best of the virtual reality experiences developed previously - namely a game-like interface that scaffolds research practices in easy to follow and engaging tasks - without the cost and complication.

In each class, students had multiple opportunities to use the platform.  The platform was easy to use (validated by student feedback), and students were able to engage with their research and the research of their fellow students immediately through the embedded map.

Exit surveys assessed students on their experience with the platform - specifically to assess where the platform was glitchy or needed adjustment. In those surveys, they also volunteered approval of the platform - a few of these excerpted comments are below.

“So far I find the app very fun to use, and exciting! I visually enjoy seeing the geotags of everyone's research on the world map.”

“In terms of research, everything the app has is great.”

“Seeing what other peers were posting helped a lot; it reassured me that I was following guidelines on the assignment, and inspired me to look at other sources for primary evidence.”

“I personally struggled with grasping history, but the website made it much easier to visualize social relations and contextualize historical events.”

“Using the tool to check out what my classmates were posting really helped me out, especially when I stress about what to write for my paper. Doing research ahead of time makes such a difference, and having guidance from what others are focusing on made it easier for me to narrow down my topics and find primary sources. Just having that overall picture made a big impact on my writing process, and I’m glad I had this app to help me connect the dots and gather what I needed.”

“I do want to say that this is such a fun assignment and please never get rid of it. I looked forward to doing this assignment more than any other for any of my classes”

In summary, the platform is:

●      Engaging and interactive:  initial reports from students suggest they enjoy working in the platform, and retain the core lessons from the exercises.

●      Flexible:  a key component of this platform is the relative simplicity of adapting the interface to support new classes and new core objectives.  This platform was designed to allow rapid, affordable, and stable deployment of new course content. 

●      Easy to integrate into existing LMS systems:  assignments can be delivered as persistent URLs or PDFs to enable easy submission by students into any LMS.