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Rebecca McManamy
Level Design
Best Practices for Teaching History Through Video Games
“ The Middle Ages ” is a self-contained campaign created in Age of Empires 2 : Definitive Edition . The purpose of the campaign is to help teach Texas Essential Knowledge and Skills from the 10th Grade World History curriculum , using the campaign as a tool to better engage students and help retain knowledge .
The campaign ’ s goal was to create a framework other educators can build upon to meaningfully integrate video games into K-12 classrooms .
This project gave me a chance to integrate my experience teaching with my new skills as a level designer . From conception to completion , the project took me about six months to complete , including building the campaign and testing its effectiveness with the goals I wanted to achieve .
I learned that by working with educators and utilizing the best practices I studied , video games can become another curriculum tool to help engage students and help them learn complex topics .
40 LEVEL DESIGN