Academy of Sciences of the Czech Republic

Stories from the History of Czechoslovakia: A Serious Game for Teaching History of the Czech Lands in the 20th Century

The project Stories from the History of Czechoslovakia aims to develop a serious game designed to teach high-school students about the political, social, and cultural history of the Czech lands between 1938 and 1989.

• The project utilizes a dialogue-based adventure format to teach Czech history from 1938 to 1989, prioritizing perspective-taking over rote memorization.
• Development relied on a two-level hierarchical finite state machine and a custom authoring tool, StoryBuilder, to decouple game content from the engine and allow historians to input data directly.
• A feasibility study of 71 high-school students confirmed that historical grounding and narrative depth are more critical for engagement than high-fidelity 3D graphics.