Gaming the Past

I was going to hold off on these until the book comes out next year, but there has been enough recent interest on Bluesky (https://bsky.app/profile/gamingthepast.bsky.social/post/3lfkff3yow22a) that I decided to put my most recent rubrics up. Please share widely and credit me when you do so I can help more people get into powerful experiential and inquiry based learninging that is the researched history game topic.

These were designed for 9th and 10th grade history students in classes where students range from grade-level reading and writing to above grade level. To adapt for middle school, reduce requirements for sources (maybe give them a single source even), formal writing components, length etc. Also consider doing a lot of this in class (I often like to split my classes into 20 minute lecture 25 minute project work). If you are teaching in Uni, consider adding more peer-reviewed sources, increasing formal documentation and sophistication of project and decreasing class work time. Either way these rubrics work quite well at getting a product from students — with your expert guidance of course.

Happy to help you work with these any time (all my contacts are on my home page). And then … hopefully mid to late 2026, Designing Historical Games for the Classroom: A Practical Guide for Educators will be out with Routledge!