Mission US, A Game that Blows My Mind!

I never thought that history could be taught this way! I can still remember how we used to bury our heads in history textbooks memorizing who did what in which year. This was how we studied history. To be honest, I don't remember much about the textbooks now.

Mission US is a game, but it is much more serious than any textbooks about history that I have ever read. The reason is that it is not about bulky books trying to cram students with facts but about stories that would happen to an ordinary person in a certain historical and cultural context. It is truly amazing!

I played the game twice, each time for an hour. I tried two missions, one in the context of 1770 and one in 1848. Through two animated teenagers’ roles, I got to live their lives in history, talked to different people, learned about the world back then and relived the key moments in history. Each role is set in a different identity in a different era in history. Players would play as these teenagers, experience their lives, finish their tasks and more importantly, learn about society in history during the process.

(see how the roles are culturally diversified!)

To me, the game is more meaningful in cultural education than linguistic education. To be honest, I myself have many words that I have no clues what the meanings are in a certain history context. So I would be concerned that the words in the games are extremely demanding to L2 learners, maybe except for college students who major in English language and literature. If asked to learn every detail of the stories, hidden historical facts and social status, students would lose the interests due to the totally demanding culture-embedded texts. However, it doesn't mean we can’t use it in language teaching.

I would use it as an extensive cultural class. Here are what my objectives would be:

1. For each mission, students should be able to summarize the main social classes and conflicts in the historical contexts, different parties and their different interests.

2. For each mission, students should be able to identify the key features of the specific era in American history and why it is so important in history.

3. For each mission, students should be able to understand at least 10 new words that are embedded with cultural meanings.

4. For each mission, students should be able to identify reasons for why choosing some answers over others to at least 5 interactions with different roles.

(These objectives are constructed by myself, but I did refer to Kyle Mawer's task types)

How to assess if students have achieved these goals?

For objectives 1 and 2, I would have students write short essays to respond to a series of prompts I have designed for them, mainly on historical significance and social conflicts in a certain period. For objective 3 and 4, I would pick up some conversations from the plot and go through them with students. During the process, I can access them orally. Since the contents are mostly about conversations, the dialogic communication of the game is quite helpful. However, the communication is achieved by oral expressions from the roles in the game and the multiple choice questions for the students. I would have students to perform the conversations in real life, so that they can also produce outputs, and meanwhile, I could assess whether they have made the right choices and what their understandings are towards the different choices.

Language performance indicators: ESL.C.9-12.5.1.2

Students demonstrate an understanding of a broad range of US cultural and political referents through institutions, functions and processes at the local and national levels, and compare/contrast these with parallels in the student’ native community.