This award-winning game turns kids into history detectives! Made in partnership with PBS Wisconsin and archivists at the Wisconsin Historical Society.
Play as Jo Wilder, a scrappy girl who spends her days with her pet badger Teddy and her grandpa, a historian. When some mysterious artifacts show up at the History Museum, you must unravel the clues to find the real stories behind the artifacts.
Students will engage with the game as a tool for critical thinking and historical inquiry. As the plot unfolds, players come across primary source materials. They use the same skills as real historians: investigation, identification, corroboration and contextualizing evidence. To win each challenge, players must piece together the evidence to argue their case.
Jo Wilder and the Capitol Case, a historical inquiry adventure game, was designed with a cohort of third, fourth and fifth grade social studies teachers and tested by students throughout the state of Wisconsin.
Jo Wilder and the Capitol Case leverages primary source documents. The game is aligned with the Wisconsin Department of Public Instruction’s newly revised 3-5th grade Wisconsin Standards for Social Studies. These Standards for Social Studies “...provide an important foundation to prepare students to become engaged, informed participants committed to the ideas and values of our democratic republic, able to apply the skills of inquiry, collaboration, decision-making, and problem-solving (adapted from the National Council for the Social Studies definition).” Jo Wilder and the Capitol Case was designed in close partnership with the DPI and the Wisconsin Historical Society in order to embody these new standards and their shift toward inquiry-driven pedagogy, specifically targeting the 3-5th grade standards outlined below.
SS.Inq2.b.i
Evaluate resources to determine which best support the inquiry and supporting questions.
SS.Inq3.b.i
Select appropriate evidence from sources to support a claim.
These standards are addressed in the challenge sequences in the game, in which the player must select appropriate evidence to complete a logical claim about a historical interpretation.
SS.Inq2.b.i
Analyze individuals, groups, and events to understand why their contributions are important to historical change and/or continuity.
This standard is addressed through the historical content of the game--suffrage and environmentalism.
SS.Hist4.c.i
Describe the intended purpose of a specific primary or secondary source.
This standard is addressed by the basic mechanic of the game--discovering the true intended purpose of specific primary source artifacts.
Teacher resources and tips were developed in partnership with Wisconsin Public Television. Coming soon in the Fall of 2018
Jo Wilder and the Capitol Case is an open source project licensed under the MIT License: https://github.com/fielddaylab/jo_wilder
Our team is based at the Wisconsin Center for Education Research at the University of Wisconsin - Madison. We make learning games that bring contemporary research to the public, and we use the game data to understand how people learn.
Interested in making something together? email David Gagnon
for all other inquiries, please contact Reyna Groff
Read the stories behind our games and meet the researchers and teachers who have teamed up with us.
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