Gaming the Industrial Revolution: Participatory Design with Historical Data for Classroom Learning

"Gaming the Industrial Revolution" presents the design and rationale of Industrial Re:evolution, a classroom simulation game built to teach the causes of the Industrial Revolution in England and Wales between 1600 and 1851 across 19 regions. The authors argue that the topic has become difficult to teach in UK secondary schools, and that teachers attribute this decline to its data-heavy, multifactor complexity and to a tendency to teach it through individual biographies rather than underlying concepts. The project positions participatory, game-based learning as a response to these challenges.

The game was co-designed between 2019 and 2023 through four participatory workshops involving teachers, game developers, artists, students, and academics. Teacher surveys informed its content priorities, which centred on the Malthusian trap, pre-industrial development, geography, and Empire. The simulation draws on established historical datasets, including CamPop, the Maddison Project, and Emma Griffin's autobiographical collection, and uses a top-down interface in which players manage population migration, labour allocation, and resource trade across 25-year turns that trigger historical events. The designers organise the experience around four goals: challenge, discovery, control, and narrative.

The document's central contribution is its account of how historical data and classroom needs can be translated into an interactive system. However, its evidential claims remain provisional. The planned comparison between game-taught and textbook-taught cohorts across more than 20 English schools had not been completed at the time of writing, so no conclusions about learning outcomes are yet available. The closing reference list, which draws heavily on E. A. Wrigley's work on energy and English social standing, supplies the scholarly grounding for the game's historical framing but contains no independent findings.