As with many cases of the Covid-19 Pandemic, we are being forced to undergo new ways of living, of learning and teaching. It comes back to 'survival of the fittest', the one's best suited to adapt to their enviroment is the one that survives. Critical thinking must be merged with creative thinking.
How can you engage students who all exist in separate spaces? How can learning be fun when it appears void of the stimulus typically associated with learning? In the case of history, there is arguably, no better way to learn than to recreate it. For Classics, which already has significant interest, what could it mean if we could recreate the streets of early Rome, or the agora of Athens? What could this mean for learning, and what should we be cautious of?
My 11 year old sister offered me a clue to a puzzle that continues to depict our future. She spends most of her time on her computer, playing a popular game called 'Roblox' with her friends. You can create an avatar, usually in a flattering 'cubic' form, and play just about any of the games within. Users can develop their own worlds and games too, which means there is an endless amount of games within the game. There is even a 'Pompeii Simulator', which recreates a rather scant version of Pompeii, where you need to climb up and hide under high buildings to avoid both lava and flaming fireballs. I had never thought Pompeii was something anyone would want to simulate until then.
Aside from seeming quite fun as a game, there is a remarkable significance to the platform and the future of learning. My sister, who has not had school for almost 3 months, is able to virtually interact with her friends, not only through message boards but through virtual forms. There is a sense of actually being there with them, having them come over to her absurdly large virtual mansion and interact with one another.
Ernest Cline's Ready Player One crafts its own dystopian universe, where the real world is so dismal (overpopulation and pollution) , that most people spend all their time in the virtual world of the OASIS. An entire separate world to explore and experience. Teachers don't need to take their students on trips but just virtually transport them to the pyramids of Giza for their geography class, or show 3D, interactive mathematical constructions in Math class. This is, of course, a work of fiction, but as gaming becomes more advanced and immersive, and coding becoming more accessible and necessary, who is to say the future of education won't be immersive, virtual learning?
The Washington Post have an interesting article on how teachers have adapted new ways of teaching during the pandemic. High School teachers can use Minecraft to get their students to build and interact with one another. Microsoft themselves have even introduced new digital educational games to the marketplace such as a:
A NASA-approved, student-built project that invites students to tour the International Space Station, complete with experiments
Exploring the human eye
Logic puzzle games to teach students how to code and think like programmers
A tour of D.C.'s most historical sites, including the Lincoln Memorial, the White House and the Pentagon
A tower game that teaches students about power generation from different sources like wind and nuclear
Minecraft is one of the many games that have been adapted to the educational sector. Another would be Ubisoft's Assassins Creed Origins and Odyssey, which explore Roman Egypt and Ancient Greece respectively. The Assassins' Creed games, already a lucrative franchise, have adapted to include 'Discovery Tour', which allows students to explore sites with commentary and short, quizzes.
These 'living museums' are not, however, free. These Discovery Tours are available to purchase for 6.80 pounds on the Ubisoft store, which adds up for an entire classroom. Not to mention, in order to run them, students must possess a computer capable of running such a program. The concepts of paywalls for these resources means that publicly-funded schools may not be able to access as much resources as their private counterparts. These resources cannot be free either, since the developers that have worked hard on them also need a roof above their heads too.
Rome Reborn® is also an example of VR behind a paywall, with the product of 'RomeReborn' tour of the Roman Forum costing 19.99 dollars on the Microsoft and Mac App store. These ambitious projects will not cheap, but it may be one of the most fruitful purchases for students and teachers today.
This brings forth another question: what kind of Rome is RomeReborn creating? Is there a separate responsibility for recreating history as there is from writing about it? Recreation arguably adds another step to the examination of history, from the historical sources of both archeological and written evidence, developers must come together to try and parse these together.
The Rome Reborn app, according to Meilan Solly's Smithsonian article, is an 'ambitious undertaking [...] built by a team of 50 academics and computer experts over a 22 year period [...]'
What does this mean for Classics? It predicts a collaboration that will take the future of Classics, arguably, to a wider level than the traditional solo-research approach.
There is, however, an element of imagination necessary in these recreations, especially in regard to conflicting sources and filling in these gaps. These Roman recreations tend towards the more source-ridden Imperialist version of Rome rather than its earlier days, not to mention, there is significant interest in this idea of Rome. There is an element of responsibility in these recreations, perhaps a clearer, visual of the aesthetics of our mind might lead to a tendency towards more favorable sources. Nonetheless, the world of Virtual Reality is one we cannot ignore, especially in today's climate where virtual experience has become engrained in the vernacular. Should Classics wish to immerse people more than ever in its world, will it be willing to sacrifice authenticity for imagination?