Playing History

If you’ve been looking at ways to try livening up your lessons, some alternate assessments, or if you have some of that ever elusive spare time in your lesson planning, you might want to take a peek at Playing History.

Playing History advertises itself as a source for historical games, but you’re not going to find old versions of Pong, Pac-Man, Mario, or even Final Fantasy here (thought you can still die of dysentery in the original Oregon Trail!).  All the games on Playing History are centered on key events or concepts in history – primarily American and British – with the other social sciences mixed in throughout.

Close to 130 games are available and the front page of Playing History allows you to pinpoint areas of interest through a prominent tag cloud or you could search and/or browse all the games to find something appropriate for your classes.  A free registration allows you to rate and review the games as well, but these are not limited to educators so take them with a grain of salt.

Make sure that you test any of the games on Playing History before using them with class to ensure they are appropriate for your students and that they will work on your systems.  Just remember that any flash-based games will not work on Apple products like an iPad.