History app

Dimensions of a history app (visualization)

History apps are apps for dealing with history and history culture in the area of ​​learning (see also learning software , e-learning ), entertainment or the combination of learning and training (see also edutainment ). They are used to deal with an individual historical topic or as part of a course (curriculum) ; in the social form of individual learning or in the context of a group or class ( “flipped classroom” ). What apps have in common is interactivity , i.e. the active participation of users by solving tasks. These can be evaluated by the program itself or as part of classroom teaching. They differ from learning platforms in that no material is exchanged and the content of the app is predefined.

Areas of application and objectives

• Educational games: factual knowledge and training; Educational games enable the playful memorization of facts and simple contexts in the form of tasks in multiple choice format. Examples: LearningApps .
• Simulations: knowledge; Simulations enable knowledge by playing through simplified models of historical processes in the form of simulation or role-playing games; see Simtainment .
  

  History app Escape from the Holocaust, page with the possibility of choosing among the people
• Training in historical thinking : acquisition of history didactic skills (see history didactic competence models ); Perceiving history and the past, opening up history and the past, orienting oneself in past and present, acting in the present and the future. Such history apps encourage users to deal with sources and representations (= materials) in the field of history and historical culture. With a set of materials, you set up a learning landscape in which the users can move partially guided, partially move freely and solve tasks. Examples:
  • Pivot the World: The project by Asma Jaber and Samit Jitan makes it possible to trace the history of historical locations back through image documents and, to a certain extent , to document it as a prosumer .
  • The Smithsonian National Museum of Natural History in Washington is using an app to bring the skeletons of archaic animals to life in the Bone's Hall, which opened in 1881. With the help of the app, visitors can see how the skeletons suggest the animals' way of life.
  • “My Bourbaki Panorama”: The users can access the huge painting about the internment of the Bourbaki army on the Swiss border in the winter of 1871 in the Bourbaki Panorama in Lucerne by looking at two figures of their choice whose biographies have been scientifically processed , put them in their place and experience the events from their perspective and describe them in a letter. They create their personal «Bourbaki album». You can email this to yourself from the app as a result of your work.
  • The history app “Fleeing the Holocaust” (2018) enables young people to meet five people who had to flee from the Holocaust . You interactively deal with their narrative and combine them with historical sources and representations to create a personal album that can be evaluated in collaborative learning . The app was developed by the Institute for History Didactics and Cultures of Remembrance of the PH Luzern , the Austrian Institute for Holocaust Education of the Federal Ministry of Education, Science and Research, _erinnern.at_, and the Center for User-Centered Technologies of the FH Vorarlberg .
  • The “App into History” offers various functions for learning history in school and outside of school. Users can create multimedia timelines, tag photos together and locate the locations of the photos on a map. It is a free web app that can be used with any browser.

Web links

• App into the story
• Pivot the World project
• Smithsonian National Museum project
• Project of the Bourbaki Panorama Luzern
• Documents for the history app "Fleeing the Holocaust"

literature

Daniel Bernsen, Alexander König, Thomas Spahn: Media and historical learning. A determination of the ratio and a plea for digital history didactics. In: Journal for Digital History, Volume 1, 2012, pp. 1–27
Peter Gautschi : "Histotainment" on the tablet PC and in the Bourbaki Museum. In: Joanna Wojdon (Ed.): E-teaching history. Cambridge Scholars Publishing, Cambridge 2016, ISBN 978-1443885843 , pp. 38–49
Teacher's guide to “My Bourbaki Panorama”, Lucerne 2016 (PDF, 14MB)
Jeremiah McCall: Gaming the past. Using video games to teach secondary history. Routledge, London, New York 2011, ISBN 978-0-415-88759-5
Dennis Röder: Smartphone Apps: Their Use of History and Use for History Teaching. In: Joanna Wojdon (Ed.): E-teaching history. Cambridge Scholars Publishing, Cambridge 2016, ISBN 978-1443885843 , p. 141-152

Individual evidence

1. ↑ according to the Education Directors Conference of German-speaking Switzerland (DEDK): curriculum 21 ; other, slightly different models: history-didactic competence models
2. ↑ Videobook for the Bourbaki panorama (for iOS devices)
3. ↑ Handout for teachers
4. ↑ Available free of charge from Google Playstore , App Store and _erinnern.at_ (Windows version)
5. ↑ http://app-in-die-geschichte.de/about