446 Summary Playing with the truth Learning to reason about historical literature with a digital game on The dark room of Damocles Introduction This dissertation describes the educational design study that I conducted to develop a digital game that teaches students how to reason about historical literature. Research shows that historical fiction has essential benefits for its readers. It can contribute to students’ socio-cultural development and historical awareness, and it can help them to broaden their worldviews and increase their critical thinking skills. Just like modern fiction, historical literature helps to increase students’ vocabulary and language comprehension and empowers them to empathize with other people. Given its great potential, historical fiction offers interesting opportunities for motivational and meaningful literature education. Unfortunately, these opportunities are not always abundantly exploited. This is partly due to known issues such as limited space in the curriculum, lack of motivation among students, and students’ limited literary competence. Also, partly due to their lack of contextual knowledge, students find it hard to interpret historical literature. Therefore, teachers in class often opt for a lecturelike format in which they mainly provide information about the historical literature discussed. Historical literature is thus taught in a different, more teacher-directed way than other literature, with less room for students’ personal input and reflection. This seems like a missed opportunity, because active teaching methods are known to provide better conditions for students’ motivation to learn. Against this background, I decided to develop a digital game for teaching historical Dutch literature, based on the empirically grounded assumption that adding game elements to the teaching-learning process, i.e., the gamification of learning, is perfectly in line with the current student generations’ perceptions and expectations of and around literature, since entertainment and play are relevant elements in their school life and social life. Moreover, effectively designed (educational) games appear to promote students’ involvement, creativity, and productivity in the teaching-learning process. Research also shows that gamification offers possibilities when it comes to motivation for reading literature. The main research question of the educational design study that
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