Historical Scene Investigation (HSI) can turn your History class into a CSI episode.
If you teach History in high school, you are familiar with document-based questions (DBQs) or just having your students make conclusions from primary source documents. HSI has created 13 historical scenarios based on topics such as slavery, Jamestown, and the 1970s and framed them as criminal cases. Your students' job is to crack the case
by using the documents in the case file. It's really cool.
Another cool game to model your coursework after is Urgent Evoke. Urgent Evoke offers missions for students to complete and the missions are tiered into Learn, Act, and Imagine categories.
In the Learn category, the base level, students research the mission's topic. In the Act category, students apply the information they learned by creating some type of product such as an ad campaign or a garden. In the final level, the Imagine level, students synthesize everything and create a new idea based on that mission's information. For each level completed, students earn points.
Nearly 20,000 people took part in Urgent Evoke. Check it out!
Even if you don't teach Social Studies, how might you frame your curriculum as a puzzle to be solved or as a real-world application?
love love love this idea! thanks for the link.
ReplyDeleteI am very impressed with the HSI idea. Everyone knows about "CSI" so the connection with "HSI" is a good attention grabber. The fact that the lessons employ the use of primary sources and multiple problem solving strategies, it addresses many of the levels on Bloom's Taxonomy. And, as the students are working in cooperative learning groups to accomplish their tasks, they are employing some of the Marzano strategies.
ReplyDeleteI teach Virginia History and greatly appreciate the citings of the Virginia History Standards of Learning. I am looking forward to incorporating this idea into my classroom. Thanks for sharing.