Craig Brumwell

Kitsilano Secondary School, Vancouver (British Columbia)

As part of a lesson called Shifting Commitments: Safety, Security and Sacrifice in a Changing World, Mr. Brumwell’s students use game technology to travel back to their high school during the Second World War. Learners are presented with primary source artifacts triggered through Global Positioning Systems (GPS) and Quick Response (QR) codes on their mobile devices. They also have fictitious conversations with past Kitsilano students, interact with a Geographical Information Systems (GIS) map, and watch present-day interviews of survivors who went to the school. The game is a means for students to better understand the difficult decisions confronting people during the war by positioning them in the historical perspective of students from their own school at that time. Students complete a number of individual and team-based exercises to determine and defend a course of action to address national security, both in historical and modern contexts.