Are you getting ready to dust off your old World War 1 Lesson Plans for another round of teaching the Great War? How many years have you used this lesson? Are you going to be excited to come to school to teach it? Are your students going to be excited to come to your class to learn about World War I? The answers are probably no to both. If you’re not excited it’s fairly easy to predict that students won’t be excited either.

Wouldn’t it be great if there was a way for students to experience the First World War instead of just listening to you talk about it? HistorySimulation.com has created some very hands on lesson plan activities that are designed to increase student engagement and create student interest in World War 1. Students are assigned the roles of leaders of countries involved in the 1st World War. Each country has a standing army and a schedule of reserves that are activated by mobilization. Some countries even have navies that can do battle with other navies and can transport troops from one region to another. Now you might ask: how does this not just turn into a quest for world domination or a game of Risk? Each country has a set of objectives that were the objectives of those countries in World War 1. The objectives are part of the student’s grades! Students are constantly negotiating and conducting diplomacy with other countries based on their strategy to achieve those objectives. With HistorySimulation.com’s online platforms, a lot of these tasks are automated like mobilizing troops, calculation of sea and land battles. Troops and navies are represented by numbers and the country’s flags on the map. The teacher can move troops into a zone and double click on the zone- activating the battle.

When the simulation ends, student interest is a lot higher as to what actually happened in the war. The discussion is better and more engaged. HistorySimulation.com also has a complete set of Keynote and PowerPoint presentations that get students engaged in learning. I don’t think you can underestimate the impact that getting students interested in a subject has. In February of 2018, using periods 1-5 of my World History sections at IFAHS i can show you the comparison of scores and the factors related to them. In the previous unit, we studied 2 sections of Ch. 24 “Nationalist Revolutions Sweep The West”. We followed that up with the World War 1 Simulation. When the simulation was over, we studied what really happened in the war, going over 4 sections of Chapter 29 “The Great War”. So we are talking about covering twice as much material on the test! You can see the results in the chart and decide for yourself if participating in a simulation increased learning: