Teacher reference
The people behind the historical encounters.
Story expeditions extend the longer campaigns with four connected areas, topic-specific fictional guides, a separately dated historical encounter, collected records, and a small interpretation project. Choose Explore story districts above a supported game.
All dialogue is newly authored dramatization, not a quotation or a recovered conversation. Portraits are illustrated reconstructions, not authenticated likenesses. The historical person reflects a limited documented argument or contribution; the game does not claim to reproduce their complete personality, beliefs, or private thoughts.
Keep the chronology visible. A figure from an earlier period appears in a clearly dated reconstruction. The records room and final project are present-day interpretive spaces. Contemporary scientific, financial, and civic teaching remains with the fictional guides. The historical encounters do not replace current course materials.
Reviewing student work
Ask students to distinguish the fictional setting, the historical record, and their own inference. Check the topic-specific claim, evidence, comparison across time, and the project tradeoff. Completion and word counts do not grade reasoning. Work tokens and opening-day consequences are invented rules, not measured historical outcomes or scores for political viewpoints.
The main campaign and story expedition have separate browser saves. Students can export either one, restore it on another device, and download a text record of the choices and replies they encountered. No name, student account, microphone, or personal health information is needed. Read-aloud uses the device’s ordinary voice; it does not imitate the historical person.
Playing time depends on reading, exploration, discussion, and revision. Allow an additional 20–35 minutes as a planning estimate, then adjust from classroom trials. This estimate has not been measured with students.
Historical source checkpoints
James Madison · 1787 · ratification debate
Federalist No. 10 argues that representation and a large republic can help control the effects of faction. It does not promise to eliminate conflict.
Scope: Compare a founding argument with your fictional institutional problem; Madison is not commenting on a modern policy. Madison defended a proposed Constitution and enslaved people. His account of liberty did not describe equal participation for everyone.
Frederick Douglass · July 1852 · Rochester
Douglass delivered his Fourth of July address on July 5, 1852. He confronted the contradiction between national liberty and American slavery.
Scope: A dated encounter about ideals and exclusion, not an invitation to speak for every enslaved person. This is an interpretation of a public address, not a reconstruction of a private meeting. Do not make slavery a negotiable game benefit.
Ida B. Wells · 1895 · anti-lynching journalism
Wells investigated racist violence and challenged justifications for lynching through reporting and publications including A Red Record.
Scope: Journalism and civic accountability; the player does not reenact violence. Discussion refers to racist violence without graphic reenactment. A source’s accusation is not an established fact.
Adam Smith · 1776 · The Wealth of Nations
Smith discussed division of labor, exchange, and public works in The Wealth of Nations. Greater output does not by itself establish how benefits are distributed.
Scope: Compare economic reasoning across eras without projecting present-day credit products into 1776. This historical discussion is not current financial advice or a complete account of Smith’s thought.
Maggie Lena Walker · 1903 · Richmond, Virginia
Walker founded the St. Luke Penny Savings Bank in 1903 and served as its president, linking financial enterprise with community opportunity.
Scope: A historical comparison about economic access; modern calculations remain with the game’s contemporary guides. The scene does not model her actual ledger, loan terms, or a present-day financial product.
Robert Owen · 1819 · British factory reform
Owen supported early factory reform. The 1819 Cotton Mills Act barred employment below nine in covered cotton mills and limited hours for those under sixteen; enforcement remained weak.
Scope: Earlier context for industrial reform, not a witness placed inside a later factory. A manufacturer’s reform argument does not stand for every worker. This encounter predates the 1833 Factory Act.
Bertha Lutz · 1945 · San Francisco conference
Lutz and other women delegates advocated women’s rights during the drafting of the UN Charter in 1945. Their role complicates accounts centered only on major-power leaders.
Scope: A reconstruction of a documented position at the 1945 founding conference. The charter’s language did not immediately secure equal treatment worldwide. This is not a simulation of actual confidential negotiations.
Johannes Gutenberg · c. 1455 · Mainz workshop
Gutenberg’s Mainz work contributed to European printing with movable metal type. Printing existed in East Asia earlier. He died in 1468.
Scope: An earlier reconstruction, never a living Gutenberg in the game’s 1470 street. Gutenberg’s early life and private views are incompletely documented. This fictional meeting is dated before his death, even when the main game takes place later.
Ibn Battuta · 1354 · recollections after travel
Ibn Battuta traveled through Mali in 1352–1353. His travel narrative offers a situated account of people and places, not a description of every African society or later century.
Scope: A dated comparison about travel and source perspective, not a witness transported into another century. The portrait is conjectural. The historical encounter belongs to the fourteenth century and is separate from the main game’s date.
William James · 1890 · attention and experience
In The Principles of Psychology, James described attention as selective and connected interest with what enters experience.
Scope: A historical lens on selective experience; contemporary topic evidence remains in the field conversations. A nineteenth-century account is historical context, not a substitute for current evidence about sleep, emotion, personality, or treatment.
Hermann Ebbinghaus · 1885 · memory research
Ebbinghaus studied memory experimentally, including learning and relearning. A failure to recall does not necessarily mean that all effects of learning have vanished.
Scope: An historical methods comparison; the main game teaches the current topic. Self-experiments with constrained materials do not establish a universal timetable for every person or kind of memory.
Santiago Ramón y Cajal · 1906 · nervous-system research
Cajal’s work supported the view that the nervous system consists of distinct nerve cells. He shared the 1906 Nobel Prize with Camillo Golgi for work on nervous-system structure.
Scope: Historical structural research; later neuroscience is explained by contemporary fictional guides. This encounter concerns historical microscopy, not modern imaging, a diagnosis, or a claim that a single drawing reveals every neural mechanism.
Ivan Pavlov · 1904 · physiology laboratory
Pavlov’s research included digestion and conditioned reflexes. His 1904 Nobel Prize recognized work on digestion, not a prize specifically for classical conditioning.
Scope: A historical physiology encounter, with later learning theories kept distinct. This is an interpretation of historical research. Students do not conduct animal or human experiments in the game.
Albert Bandura · 1961 · observational-learning research
The 1961 Bandura, Ross, and Ross study examined children’s imitation following exposure to adult models. Laboratory behavior is not a direct measure of a person’s lifelong character.
Scope: A dated research discussion, not a live experiment or a prescription for classroom conduct. Historical research is interpreted rather than repeated. Do not ask students to imitate aggression or recruit participants.
Evelyn Hooker · 1957 · research and assumptions
Hooker compared nonpatient gay and heterosexual men, using judges unaware of sexual orientation. Her research challenged assumptions equating homosexuality with maladjustment.
Scope: A historical study of sampling and bias; no student identity information is requested. Sexual orientation is not a disorder. The historical study used a limited sample of men and cannot represent every population or settle every research question.
Jean Piaget · 1950s · reasoning about conservation
Piaget investigated the development of reasoning, including conservation: recognizing that some quantities remain unchanged despite changes in appearance.
Scope: A historical reasoning task, not a claim that development follows an identical timetable for everyone. Developmental tasks are not diagnoses or fixed measures of intelligence. Historical stage accounts require comparison with later evidence and individual variation.