Technology and Education: the digital game as a learning tool about Archaic Rome

Abstract

Based on the development of skills and competences involving the use of digital technologies for learning (present in the BNCC, in the the Curriculum Paulista and in the Curriculum of the City of São Paulo), this project has as its central objective the elaboration of two complementary digital games for use in computers and portable devices. The pioneering theme will deal with the pre-monarchical period and the beginning of the monarchy in the History of Rome, showing the formation of the city, which is generally not addressed in school textbooks - although some of the BNCC's skills dialogue with this theme . (EF06HI11-Characterize the formation process of Ancient Rome and its social and political configurations in the monarchic and republican periods; EF06HI12-Associate the concept of citizenship with dynamics of inclusion and exclusion in ancient Greece and Rome; EF06HI15-Describe the dynamics of circulation of people, products and cultures in the Mediterranean and their significance). In the proposed games, the archaeological approach and the digital language intertwine, so that students and teachers use digital technologies in a critical and creative way. The games in question bring didactic resources in the form of digital learning objects, which intend to support significant pedagogical practices aimed at developing skills and abilities that encourage student understanding of the past within new forms of communication and production of information (such as animations, simulators, digital games, podcasts and video lessons), known mainly (but not exclusively) by the younger public, whose use of digital technology is inseparable from their daily activities. The pedagogical purpose of this project is, therefore, to encourage an investigation into the past guided by an active learning process to encourage student protagonism in the face of knowledge. Bearing these premises in mind, the games Roma Arcaica: Protohistoria & Roma dos Reis aim to bring an approach and a program that give a more effective formation to the discipline of history of Rome, which, in general, deals with more recent periods of Republican and imperial Rome. In a long-term perspective, the issues addressed in these games are based on the formation and transformation of the processes that incorporated Italy into the Mediterranean context since the end of the Bronze Age (11th-10th centuries BC). Such questions go beyond the specific historical circumstances of the two best-known narratives, centered on Greece and Rome, equally significant, in order to constitute civilizations. The general field of study in which the theme of the beginnings of Rome is placed is therefore not so much Roman history as, rather, Italic protohistory, that is, the complex of problems relating to that age which saw in Italy the transformation of prehistoric village cultures into incipient urban structures, the gradual formation of historically known ethnic unions, those first contacts with the East and with Greece that were decisively times of the birth and first development of the city. The concern, therefore, is to contextualize the myriad of other processes, equally relevant, witnessed in the Italian Peninsula, in order to understand the formation of Rome itself within the framework of individual community networks and which culminated in the formation of city-states, both in region of Lazio, as in Etruria, in addition to the areas of Greek presence in Sicily and southern Italy. It is also opportune to highlight the advantages of the subject being part of the sixth year curriculum, that is, students in initial training, when they will first come into contact with the theme, this being a favorable perspective for understanding the trajectory of Rome in the periods of the Republic and Empire. To deepen these questions on this theme, a Didactic Guide will also be produced with base texts and pedagogical proposals for the application of both games in the classroom. (AU)