A Critical Action Game: Fall of Artica Investigating New Forms of Collective Inquiry for Critical Action

• In Event: Saturday Roundtable Session 1:15 pm
  In Roundtable Session: Engaging Our Students and Ourselves: Teaching in New Dimensions and Contexts (Table 11)

Abstract

This paper presents Fall of Artica (FOA), a Critical Action Game set in a dystopian world that engages students to think critically and build media literacy through collective (i.e., whole class) inquiry within the dystopian context. The FoA game employed AI-Chatbots as Non-Player Characters, allowing students to converse naturally with FoA citizens through a “portal into their dystopian world.” The NPCS allow students to uncover the game narrative and receive clues and quests supporting their broader inquiry arc. This paper describes our initial application of these NPCs in an 11th-grade visual arts curriculum where students construct visual representations of the dystopian context, focusing on settings, characters, and artifacts.

Authors

• Kathy H. Zhou, University of Toronto - OISE

• James D. Slotta, University of Toronto - OISE