The Course of History

My name is Max and I want to make learning immersive, engaging, and fun. To do this, I want to reconfigure school around simulating the past, from the Ancient World to the present, thereby giving students the opportunity to recreate history on their own terms. Merging ideas from Classical Education, Constructionism, Simulations, and Game Design, I believe we can create a compelling tutorial for the modern world in which students rediscover the major lessons of history through their own experience, trial, and error.

I am a lifelong lover of history which led to me telling tales of crazy and infamous deeds throughout college. This got to the point that I founded a history discussion club, in which the members shared stories of pirates, ancient heroes, stern philosophers, and strange happenings that we discovered in our classes. When I went to grad school, I found that my favorite part was teaching discussion sections. This was my first foray into trying to make history come alive and I developed simulations in which my students role-played the CIA vs. Guatemalan guerillas and the different sides in World War 2.

When I got a chance to teach in a new, creative, and forward thinking high school, I seized the freedom to offer a simulation based class on Ancient Greece. In it, every lesson was paired with a simulation in which students reenacted what they had just learned, taking the opportunity to actively reconstruct the past. This was without a doubt, the most exciting project I’ve ever undertaken.

Why Ancient Greece? In undergrad, I took an incredible class on the Origins of Global Capitalism taught by Professor Erik Grimmer-Solem. In it, we learned about one of the first multinational corporations: the Dutch East India Company. This lesson was not only instructive in the context of Early Modern economic history, but it was hugely helpful in teaching me about the functioning of modern corporations and the present-day economy. It was so much easier to comprehend a corporation with a handful of ships and a few dozen shareholders than it was to try and wrap my head around a modern conglomerate with thousands of employees, millions of shares, and billions in market capitalization. This inspired me with the idea that history is foundational to teaching any and all subjects relevant to the modern world. By going back to the past, we go to simpler, easier to understand times that help illuminate the present and how we got here. Part of this is intuitive, it’s why every encyclopedia entry gives a historical background. But the other part, that the past is, in broad strokes, a process from simple to complex, has the potential to be revolutionary.

My goal is to redesign not just for what we think of as “history class,” but science, math, literature, philosophy, and more. All knowledge and wisdom comes from the past. By grounding all subjects historically, it becomes possible to teach all subjects in concert so that they reinforce and illuminate each other while progressing from simple to complex. People didn’t fly to the moon while also struggling to piece together the basics of algebra. My hope is that students learn about the Cold War context of the Apollo Moon Missions at the same time as they learn the tenets of the rocket science that got them there. Students will encounter content in a deeper context which will make more sense and enable their lessons to be more transferable to real world environments than the siloed, rote facts hammered on by modern education.

To me, games and longform simulations should be the loom that weaves these all together into a cohesive, interactive context. They present rich, immersive settings that can bind together navigation and political will, religion and art, engineering and demographics, along with every other bit of information that helped humans build modern civilization. This is my overarching goal.