Educational Philosophy Underlying Professor Cramwell's History

Professor Cramwell’s History intends to do 2 things:
 A) Be fun and interesting to play
 B) Impart the player with a skeletal but comprehensive understanding of history

After playing this game you should be able to order many major events in history both absolutely and with respect to each other. Gaining this knowledge will then further allow you to place all subsequent reading you do within a mental framework and should reinforce whatever new knowledge you learn and whatever old knowledge you already have; nothing will stand alone.

The questions are written to give both an absolute knowledge of history (i.e. dates, ordering) and a qualitative understanding, with facts reflecting the zeitgeist of an era.

The way the first type of question operates is obvious. But perhaps the second type of question is even more important because this type of question contains seeds of vast knowledge within its very statement. For example, take a very trivial question like this one:

How many animals were sacrificed when Caesar became Emperor?

Think about what knowledge is linked to this trivial question for someone who doesn’t know anything about history:
1) There was someone named Caesar
2) He became an Emperor of something
3) In that empire they sacrificed a lot of animals

By just reading the question you get a lot of information. This is the point of many of the questions; to impart knowledge this way. When you get a further question that explains that Caesar was emperor of Rome you already have an idea of what Rome was, at least in part: you know it was an empire at some point, you suspect it was brutal.

Thus someone with no knowledge of history can learn history simply by playing a game.

The great advantage of a game with properly written questions over a book (at least for initial learning of simple facts) is that knowledge validation and knowledge transmission are performed simultaneously and that feedback is instant. Of course this only works up to a point, eventually you have to move beyond knowledge that can be game-ified if you want to truly master a subject.

So, if I was playing the game for the first time, I wouldn’t try to just finish all the challenges immediately, I would just meander through history in my few spare moments and soak up information slowly and widely. Enjoying the experience of learning, because (at least I think) learning is fun, facts are fun, because reality is just very interesting.

-Tomaz