THE ROLE OF COMPUTER GAMES IN THE EDUCATION OF HISTORY

The goal of this paper is to assess whether computer games based on historical facts have an effect in the teaching of history. We have conducted a series of experiments on the Computer Science (Games Technology) students at Charles Sturt University and have written two documents of equivalent content on two separate historical events and chosen a computer game based on one of these events. We have also prepared a questionnaire that includes 10 generic questions to assess the students' learning of this material. In the experimental studies, we presented one of these events as a text document only, and the other as a text document followed by a game-play session where the game contained historical facts included in the text. The experiment was conducted with 12 randomly chosen Australian students between the ages of 18 to 25. After the reading of the document only on the first event the students were tested, and after the game play session following the reading of the text on the second event the students were tested. We found the test results higher for the text document followed by the game-play session. In this paper, we draw conclusions from these findings and suggest that computer games support education of history with the presentation of a proactive and interactive learning environment.