Digital media and tools are an effective way to target my audience on history and historical thinking, based on information I gained at a recent conference at Swarthmore College and from viewing the 2021 conference panel video, “Taking Video Games Seriously.” Both stressed the need for educators to consider games as a pedagogical tool for research and teaching, given Americans’ insatiable appetite for video games, much of which is rooted in historical themes. Importantly, my target audiences, Gen Z and Millennials, have years of experience in video game culture.

Teaching students the history aspect of my project topic is secondary to getting students to engage in historical thinking, a process of critically examining historical materials to construct a more accurate and complete picture of events. This process will require that I provide students with multiple accounts and perspectives, help them learn to analyze and ask questions about historical sources, help them understand the historical context of sources, and help them make the connection between a claim and its supporting evidence.

This tool can also provide students with a different medium for engaging with historical materials from the turn of the century to analyze and raise questions about this time. Further, the use of this medium can help students consider that the area they are familiar with today would have been quite different and unfamiliar at the turn of the century.

Twine uses a role-playing, linear-based design, and this component requires me to carefully design my game to meet the goal of historical thinking. an. To make it an effective game, I need to scaffold my game, recognizing that students will come to it with different experiences and expectations. I also need to consider my game’s design by first establishing its argument and then aligning the design to support the narrative and mechanics of that argument.

The above process I explained means I need to focus more narrowly on my project’s intended audience, so the content will engage this specific audience in design choices (Kirilloff, 2021). I will include a character who reflects this age group and offer options that are realistic for a person of this age to experience.