I am feeling like I am falling behind the curve on my project. The biggest challenge I am having is how I want to drive my narrative to a conclusion. Educational games are not always a win or lose proposition, and this one is more of a lesson in game format.

I still have confidence in my premise, that children’s literature can be used to drive a deeper look into issues and challenges and the Wilder’s Little House series provides multiple entries into learning about the events that influence her family’s experiences. Editing which of these to use has become difficult as there are so many directions that can be taken.

My final, unexpected challenge is the books I am using. I did a very not 1880 thing and ordered a set off Amazon and apparently received the British imprint, realized when I was cross referencing an article and none of my pages matched. Not a show stopper, but I will have to be very clear which edition was used.

My next steps are to compose all my story blocks from my story board and work out the connections for the passages so it can be tested.

Review of http:theclio.com Falls Church Driving Tour

The Clio is a website and application that “connects people to information” by using geolocation to identify sites of interest in your vicinity. It allows users to develop and publish about single sites or connect single sites into a tour route. The application includes a geofencing option alerting the user when they approach a site documented on Clio.

We chose the “Falls Church” driving tour, with eight stops in the Falls Church/Arlington area. We lived in Falls Church for several years, and I wanted to see how the tour would do with a familiar area.

Once the tour “Falls Church’ was chosen, website offered a choice of walking or driving, we chose to drive the tour. The map looked simple enough to follow, however when we headed for the first stop, Mount Hope, we hit the first challenge we would have. The Clio can be used as a website browser on a mobile device or a mobile application, we tried the website on a mobile device. Afterwards, I brought up the tour on the ap to understand the differences in display.

When I selected the start button, it displayed Mount Hope as site 1, with description of the house and why it was important. The entry included a text to voice option f the narrative. Unfortunately, the map was after the opening text, and the “Directions” button redirected to Google maps or Apple Maps. Awkwardly, we had to keep flipping back and forth between the tour and the map. The addresses up front , instead of located after the map ,or at the bottom of the entry, would have allowed us to easily enter the site into the car’s navigation system and use that while reviewing background on the site we were looking at. The app and the site offer a pdf map t download with QR codes to help as well, but any extra layer of effort risks losing motivation and interest.

Alternatively, the application has turn by turn directions, that are relatively simple to follow, or it allows you to download a pdf file with a map and a list of sites, basic information and the address. The Clio app does not have all the information available on the website, but it is substantial and again, offers the text to voice option. It is a little awkward, as it is on the website version, as you have to select it for each section of narrative.

The route made sense for the traffic flow and traffic lights, with left turns being planned at lights instead of trying to drive across a busy thoroughfare. There was a choice between driving and walking, as a walking tour it would have had some areas of questionable safety.

Each stop had short narrative, images, and a longer background information, with images and relevant hours or other information listed. The Clio requires that an entry “must be an original work with sources”¹ as well. Requiring this gives the entries more substance and more credibility.

The Clio is doing a public history in an interesting and engaging way, by facilitating community engagement in history and culture. Contributors can come from anywhere and share their knowledge and research. Similarly, the users can explore their location, whether doing a tour or just curious about a neighborhood. geofenced my location and an historic marker I wanted to read, but have not as its on a parkway where the speed limit sometimes feels suggested only.

The experience did let me see an area I thought I knew differently. One of the sites I had heard the name yet knew nothing about, at least one I used to drive by daily and knew nothing about, and several were altogether new. I really appreciated the boundary marker in Benjamin Banneker Park stop and that one spotlighted the value and strengths of this type of public history. I used to run through the park 3-4 times a week, as it was on my 5 mile plus running route from my house. When I saw the park name on the tour I gave directions by “it’s where we used to walk Ella to the dog park.” In the hundreds of times I ran or walked the park, I never saw or noticed the SW9 boundary stone that marked the original District of Columbia.

I disadvantaged The Clio by not using the application, as it created some frustrating side challenges. As I work with the application it makes more sense, but I question how it will respond without a strong wi fi connection. When I used it sitting in the public library on their network the application struggled, in my house it was fine. I may have to filed test it further this week.

The idea behind the Clio and similar sites sit at the junction of public history, crowdsourcing and technology. The geofencing is a clever way to keep a user engaged, allowing them the opportunity to continually interact with history and their community.

1. https://theclio.com/faqs ↩︎

I am slowly getting the hang of Twine. The basic premise was easy, figuring out how the basics of passages and linking to the next one. I still haven’t quite worked out the use of enchantments, or how to give a response to a question, but I made a huge step forward getting not one but two hyperlinks to function properly.

It took several tries, and then the debug function gave me the answer, the ever popular forgot <> . I knew better.

I am using several resources to learn the program: The Twine Cookbook, Dr. Jessica Otis’s primer and the Grimoire guides to Twine. The Programming Historian has a helpful starter guide as well. I think part of the challenge is that I work on a MacBook, so I had to download and install instead of using the browser based version. Every single guide wrote about the challenge of using the browser based with a iOS (thanks again Apple) so I went with the less elegant solution.

Next stop, images and color palettes!

I am using the storyboarding to develop the text in Word first, filling out how each passage will connect or loop back. It also occurred to me that if I am asking people to look at the challenges first through Laura’s eyes, I should incorporate her narrative, so several of the passages will include the book text as an introduction (Sukey and the Bear is one of my favorites).

I still feel behind, but have made progress today and feel far more confident that it will end up a worthwhile endeavor.

I am using my Omeka site as a landing spot for items a player of educator can use for additional materials. I was pretty comfortable using Omeka until I ran into the challenge of Omeka Classic. As I poked and prodded to get Omeka to do what I wanted, everything looked unfamiliar although I have been using it for sometime.

I have been using Omeka -S previously. The simplicity of the problem is I worked at developing a proficiency in a slightly different version. The navigation and plug ins are different, so a few that I could not get to install suddenly made sense when I went back and looked at what they supported.

In the future, I would lean toward the S version instead of classic, as I found it more intuitive to use. Having two version makes sense for the variety of uses for Omeka — amazing sites are supported by each version and it is flexible for the needs of users.

I am beginning to get a little frantic on building my educational game, but working through. The project has some challenges I did not completely anticipate and have forced me to pivot a little on how the game will go. This is not necessarily a bad thing, as I ended up following a lot of trails in directions I did not fully expect. Laura Ingalls Wider and I, exploring new lands.

The Good: In the past few years, a lot of people have taken up her books as a framework for their arguments, whether it be societal expectations, misunderstanding or misrepresenting illnesses, or the hard truth that her stories also tell about the large scale displacement of Native Americans. To find the ideas I wanted to follow in the game, I reread all the books except Farmer Boy about Almanzo Wilder’s childhood and The First Four Years covering the early days of marriage. Reading as an adult, the stories are very different, for while Laura remains a plucky heroine, it is inescapable to look at the racism, varying from mild to very; think about child labor as she goes to work at fourteen to help her family; and how hard life as a homesteader was and how economically tenuous. I cannot add all these in a game, but it was interesting. I was able to fix some of that she tells to events happening in the world, which will help the game play.

The Bad: In spite of all the work being done, few of her letters are digitized and online. There are a handful, and some family correspondence online at in the excellent Turning Points in Wisconsin History collection at https://www.wisconsinhistory.org. I have had to work the edges of the problem, leading me to focus more on the story through the lens of treaties and legislation, combined with periodicals and maps more than letters. It has been tough, but I think workable.

The Ugly: I am behind schedule, fixating on how to use FigJam for storyboarding and starting to use Twine. I can catch up, but me next few weeks will be a little ugly.

I am not of the Oregon Trail age, in school in the Dark Ages before computers of any kind were common in schools and dot matrix printers a wonder on the horizon. So I am intrigued by games as education as they were not generally part of mine. Gaming has become a part of classroom instruction, whether a simple game to learn numbers and letters, or the use of Assassin’s Creed or Red Dead Redemption for older students. As I try to create one of my own, research into user needs leaves me intrigued by the possibilities.

My original plan was to target at least the younger end of the high school age group to a middle school age, group. Reading on educational games as they are used by different levels of education, though, I am narrowing the target ages to middle schoolers. Middle school educators, according to an Iowa State University study, prefer games that are challenging vice competitive.¹

This supports the results of the interviews conducted earlier to develop personas, both of whom used educational games. Both of them wanted games that required the players to do research and understand a concept, instead of just jumping through rote memorization challenges. The game I’m developing will hopefully engage users with requiring a combination of skills and offering paths to do more reading of primary sources to understand issues.

1. Lynn Meadows, “Research on Game-Based Learning Reveals Middle Schoolers are Motivated Differently” Faculty and Research News Iowa State University School of Education, College of Human Sciences at https://education.iastate.edu/research-on-game-based-learning-reveals-middle-schoolers-are-motivated-differently/ ↩︎

Adventures West: Laura Ingalls Wilder from the Little Cabin to the Little Grey House will be an educational game based on the text of the Little House on the Prairie series, not including Farmer Boy  and The First Four Years. Also not addressed is the period not covered in her works, when the family lived in Iowa. Not using that period was an editorial decision of Wilder and her daughter, Rose WIlder Lane, to keep the story coherent. ¹Wilder’s first book,  Little House in the Big Woods was first published in 1932, followed by another eight books continuing the Ingalls family story. The series is autobiographical fiction with highly idealized versions of her family: Pa, Ma, Mary, Carrie, Grace, and Almanzo. Similar to books such as Alcott’s Little Women, the books treat the characters as overcoming adversity through virtuousness. 

Using Laura’s descriptions of the places and details of her family’s travels from Pepin, Wisconsin to De Smet, South Dakota, explore several of the themes that run through her books. Major themes are those from three or more volumes.

The first theme is attitudes toward and displacement of Native Americans. Ma and Pa differ on their views of the relative “goodness” of the Native Americans, but still reflect the prejudices and dehumanization of the era. The books include both the events of the family settling in Indian Territory on land not opened for settlement after a rumor of further displacement and the story of Ma’s brother, who attempted to settle and mine gold in the Black Hills while still reserved lands. 

The changing environment is the second theme, in terms of geography, flora and fauna, and weather. The Ingalls family travels through multiple environments, from the woods of Wisconsin to the prairies and a growing town. Laura encounters wolves on several occasions, in the earlier books, then never again. Likewise, she encounters buffalo wallows, but is arriving after the herds of bison have been hunted to near extinction. One of Pa’s great farming failures is the result of a plague of grasshoppers and their eggs the following planting season.

The project will be a game leading the player to different events and links to resources for further investigation such as letters, images, and legislation.  The two themes will be the main stories in Twine, with the passages from the books starting the game passages.

The audience is intermediate school age students, who are accustomed to digital learning. As the protagonist of the novels is a young woman, the themes were chosen as they are non-gendered. Further iterations could include foodways, gender roles, animal husbandry and planning for travel.

1. Letter from Rose Wilder Lane to Laura Ingalls Wilder; 1/21/1938; Collection HH-RWL: Rose Wilder Lane Papers. [Online Version, https://www.docsteach.org/documents/document/letter-from-rose-wilder-lane-to-laura-ingalls-wilder, March 29, 2024]
   
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