The unusual task came to Park City High School students Taylor Bergman and Garrett Moreno through the Park City Centers for Advanced Professional Studies, or PCCAPS, program. It pairs students with local and regional companies to work on real-world business projects.
Bergman and Moreno were selected to help Victoria Sanders and her Wyoming-based company Elephanta Education by developing and testing history games for middle and high school classrooms. Bergman, a junior, said the mission was simple: create games for students, by students.
Sanders began researching and developing her interactive series “Brave” in 2018. The four-game series simulates historical events by allowing students to role-play buying and selling commodities, model trade dynamics and explore key events from U.S. history.
It’s been played by more than 3,000 Wyoming schoolchildren.
Bergman and Moreno joined Sanders as she was developing her second series, “Parlor Games,” which explores the U.S. Imperialist Era of the late 19th century.
Moreno, a senior, said the games are meant to replace traditional textbooks and lesson plans and engage kids without using screens.
“It's hard to keep a student engaged with a textbook for so long,” he said. “But with a game where you get instant feedback and like a greater perspective, because you're taking the position of someone within history, you gain a lot more knowledge and a lot more understanding that way.”
Sanders said the Brave and Parlor games were developed to meet national and many state learning standards. Both also include content to prepare students for the Advanced Placement United States History exam so students can earn college credit.
Bergman said the first thing she and Moreno did was test the first of the second-series games. Called “Reach,” it follows Alaska’s transformation from U.S. territory to 51st state, exploring the different perspectives and beliefs held during that time.
“We just ran through it multiple times trying to figure out what worked, what didn't, what we could adjust and we gave her lots of feedback on that,” she said.
The students then started work on the next two games in the series. One challenge for Bergman and Moreno was making the games work for an older audience.
Sanders said the Brave series was first tested in high schools, but things weren’t working.
“Those students had issues, maybe being vulnerable and working in small groups," she said. “They didn't seem to really want to talk about issues related to trust and to the rule of law and what it means to be honest and forthright.”
She saw the same thing with middle school students. It was at the elementary school level that things clicked.
“We took all of the data and the fieldwork notes from those experiences, sent it back to the scholars, and they said, ‘Wow, the kids absolutely did understand five and six different narratives taking place and culminating in one meta-narrative,’” Sanders said.
Bergman and Moreno kept those findings in mind when researching and creating content for the Parlor Games. This next set of games touches on themes older kids struggle with, including being authentic, empathetic and honest. They also added more complexity and strategic decision-making.
Bergman and Moreno also said they had to make sure there was a thread connecting the unique games. The next two games in the series focus on the colonization of Hawaii and Cuba.
“We came up with some ideas for mechanics and researched a lot a lot of history,” Moreno said.
Each Parlor game is meant to be played with a world map and a group of five to six students in five, one-hour sessions. Sanders said the games start with icebreakers. For example, the game Reach asks students to consider boundaries and what it means to reach out to someone before looking at it within the context of history.
“What are your boundaries? How vulnerable can you be before you know when to say, ‘I'm not willing. I'm not there for that. This is not okay,?’” Sanders said.
While the collaboration between Bergman, Moreno and Sanders has ended, Sanders said her work isn’t done. She’s continuing to develop the Parlor series, which will eventually have five games. She said she hopes to begin testing Reach soon.
