Go Games Civics: Meeting Common Core Standards With Tablet-Enhanced Multiplayer Role Play Games

GoGames will be a tablet-based multiplayer role-play game for middle school social studies classrooms and will focus on topics in civics. GoGames is intended to enable more efficient and effective implementation of traditional civics interventions by replacing static paper content and training manuals with dynamic interactive content and key information for gameplay. Modules will include LawMaker, DiscussionMaker, and TrialMaker. Each will be modeled after and will provide a new delivery mechanism for widely used civics interventions such as mock trial, model congress, and the structured academic controversy model, where small teams of students learn about a controversial issue from multiple perspectives. GoGames will use an “augmented reality” genre, where the digital game will complement and enhance real world activities by guiding students' actions and providing players with new social identities, and by facilitating interactions, teamwork, collaboration, and discussion. A teacher app will support implementation and to provide formative assessment results to guide practice.