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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For my project, I interviewed two very different woman engaged in education of middle school aged children. Their thoughts and influences provided the insight and background for the two personas I have been developing.

Carol

The Homeschool Parent

“I realized that my son was spending more time than I would like with computer based learning in the public schools and I felt he would be best suited to at home learning. It is not a permanent choice, but has been beneficial for his learning.”

Carol is a 45 year old, white married woman who has chosen to homeschool her youngest child, a son in the seventh grade. She has degrees in psychology and education and works from home as an educational consultant. Carol specializes in working with children with ADHD.

She is confident in her ability to homeschool her son, a decision that the family made due to concerns about the amount of computer assisted learning being done in the public schools.  He is the only one of her three children to be homeschooled. One of the older children is a high school graduate, the other a junior in high school.

Carol’s day is divided between supervising her 7th grade son’s schoolwork in all subjects except history, which is covered by her husband.  During the school day, her time is divided between educating her son and her professional work as an educational consultant who works with children with ADHD.

Carol admits how well it goes on any given day is at least partially dependent on the mood of the 7th grader. She did note his skills had been slightly below grade standards at the beginning of homeschooling and he was benefitting from the individualized attention.  Her husband’s history lessons also help by adding hands on activities, such as designing and making mock ups of different swords throughout the ages.

Fridays are “fun days” for field trips, games and other enriching activities.

For Carol’s family, an educational game would include finding answers and illustrating different ways of living.

Anne

Intermediate School Teacher

“I come from a long line of teachers and did not plan to be one, but found I enjoyed it. I went to graduate school when I started seeing students struggling with reading at the expected level, and realized I wasn’t completely sure how to teach it.”

Anne is a white, 40 year old woman who teaches middle school in the District of Columbia. She has degrees in English and Education, and jokes she went from a fairly liberal women’s college for undergraduate work to a very conservative university for graduate work, with a dress code that included not having bare shoulders.

Anne started teaching as a job, not a profession, until she realized she enjoyed it and wanted to learn to become a better educator. She has worked in a variety of school systems, in her current position she is working with predominantly minority students.

Anne’s day includes lesson preparation and teaching English as a Second Language in a diverse school system. She uses computer based learning, but it concerned that it is more rote learning and seeks materials that will encourage her students to learn more and improve reading skills and comprehension.

Several years ago, my father visited me in Northern Virginia. Living just outside Washington, D.C., finding something he would be interested in seeing was rarely difficult. He asked me to take him to the Smithsonian’s Steven F. Udavr-Hazy Center in Chantilly, with a specific aircraft in mind. Dad wanted to see the Vietnam era Cessna O-1A BIRD DOG. We found it suspended in one of the side halls, and something happened I did not expect. My father served in Vietnam as an advisor to the Vietnamese Navy, but never spoke much about it until the early ‘00s. That day in the museum, looking at this tiny plane that carried observers and Forward Air Controllers, he started telling me about his jaunts as a passenger during the war.  As he was sharing his exploits, I noticed out of  the corner of my eye people were edging toward us, eavesdropping. The BIRD DOG, for a few minutes, was more than an exhibit, but lived again for my father and his small audience, it once again flew over the Mekong River Delta with a daring pilot and his passenger. 

At the time, I thought it made a sweet and charming story, of my father sharing his experiences and accidentally educating other visitors. It is not Grele’s central idea, however in his closing paragraphs he says this about public history: “It promises us a society in which the broader public participates in the construction of its own history.” In any public history project, how the audience relates to the content is a critical component.¹

The title Grele chose for his discussion of public history is on point for thinking about the relationship between the audience and content, asking “Whose Public? Whose History…” Although his main ideas relate more to defining and understanding what is a public historian and their changing roles within the community of historians, he touches on the relationships, offering public history projects and practitioners as guides in how the audience accesses and uses content to develop their own knowledge and help shape their understanding of the world. 

Corbett and Miller’s “A Shared Inquiry into Shared Inquiry” offers several examples of how the audience and content, and sometimes funding, create opportunities and tensions when developing content. It was the anecdote Corbett begins the article with that made me think of my father’s visit. She is interviewing a woman to better the documentation behind some photographs, who identifies one as being herself and sister.  This led to wider involvement with the community Corbett was studying and a richer understanding of the history. Corbett explains as the interviews continued she and her subjects shared the inquiry and authority over how the content developed. The exhibit made these women feel like partners in the endeavor, although she kept the decision making authority. In this case, the audience led to a fuller story than could be told otherwise.²

Understanding how the audience will use the content, in both the physical and intellectual way can drive what content is presented. Histories of the National Mall had to decide who the audience for the site would be, the best means of getting the information to them, and the sustainability of the content. By selecting visiting tourists as a primary audience, the project had to start with the best platform for accessibility, choosing to develop an Omeka site viewable on a smartphone instead of an application, and the wifi support for visitors to the Mall. Content was arranged to allow the audience to choose what they were interested in learning more about (personally, I’m intrigued by the Cherry Tree Protest).

Audiences and content should not be separated in planning a public history project as they affect each other. In considering content, the effect on the audiences is an important factor – will it inspire, trouble, educate, entertain, welcome or exclude the intended audience. Similarly, the desired response of the audience is equally important, as well as how the content is displayed and accessed.³

1. Ronald J Grele, “Whose Public? Whose History? What is the Goal of a Public Historian?” The Public Historian, Vol 3, No.1 (Winter 1981, p. 48 ↩︎
2. Katherine T. Corbett and Howard (Dick) Miller, “A Shared Inquiry into Shared Inquiry,” Public Historian, Vol 28, No. 1 (Winter 2006) at http://www.jstor.org/stable/101525/tph.2006.28.1.15, pp. 15-16. ↩︎
3.  Cherry Tree Protest at Jefferson Memorial Site,” Histories of the National Mall, accessed March 4, 2024, https://mallhistory.org/items/show/208. ↩︎

I am starting the second class in the series for the Graduate Certificate in Digital Public Humanities, after earning my MA in Applied History at George Mason University in 2021. As a retired Naval officer, the program is a building block for a second career as a digital public historian. When I started that masters program, I envisioned working in a museum or at a historic site, with little understanding of the digital side of public history. It’s been an educational adventure.

I currently work in digital public history, as part of the staff at the Roy Rosenzweig Center for History and New Media. I have just finished work on a project cataloging postal covers and other artifacts relating to the Netherlands in World War II. Working at the RRCHNM, I am fortunate to be in an environment that thinks not only about history, but how to do digital history, producing projects and understanding how the field is evolving.

While working at the center, I applied for the graduate certificate program to build on my skills and build a stronger intellectual foundation in digital history. In both the courses already completed, I specially chose to do projects that stretched me, using Kepler.gl in the first and working on an educational game in the second. I am comfortable with Omeka, so trying something completely different has been useful.

Across years of study, I have only worked on development of teaching lessons or practicals in once class, Thirty years ago at instructor training school. I made transparencies for overhead projectors, so I can safely say that skill is beyond outdated at this point.

My primary interest in teaching and learning environments that involve more informal learning and teaching opportunities. Digital history offers opportunities to enrich physical sites, such as a museum or historic site, as well as enhance curriculum and encourage exploration. In this course I would also like to explore how to effectively make those linkages.