UGA will host a national conference for college faculty, administrators and graduate students that focuses on designing games as an educational tool for undergraduate students.
The Reacting to the Past Game Development Conference, hosted by UGA’s Reacting to the Past Program and the Center for Teaching and Learning, will take place July 15-18 in the Miller Learning Center.
Conference participants will play several Reacting-style games that are in development, discuss game design principles and processes and work to expand and explore ideas for new games. Newbie Day, a one-day pre-conference workshop for newcomers that serves as an introduction to Reacting to the Past pedagogy, will feature “The Trial of Anne Hutchinson: Liberty, Law and Intolerance in Puritan New England.”
Reacting to the Past consists of elaborate games, set in the past, in which students are assigned roles informed by classic texts in the history of ideas.
Class sessions are run entirely by students; instructors advise and guide students and grade their oral and written work. Reacting to the Past seeks to draw students into the past, promote engagement with big ideas and improve intellectual and academic skills.
Pioneered in the late 1990s by Mark C. Carnes, a professor of history at Barnard College, the Reacting to the Past curriculum has been implemented by faculty at hundreds of colleges and universities in the U.S. and abroad since 2001. Reacting to the Past has been used at UGA since 2003.