Volume CXXXIII, Number 9 November 9, 2001 f

Profile: Rael's amazing Flight to Freedom
MATTHEW SPOONER
STAFF WRITER

This week, Bowdoin Professor Patrick Rael will unveil a unique new resource for students and teachers hoping to learn more about slavery in the pre-Civil War South. Rael's Flight to Freedom, the result of two years of collaboration with the Educational Technolgy Center, is a web-based game that allows players to struggle first-hand with the challenges that fugitive African-Americans faced on their perilous journey towards freedom.

"[Professor Rael] has combined two things in this project in a way they haven't been before," said English Professor and ETC Director Peter Schilling. "One is the theory of history that to learn a type of culture you have to learn its stories, and the other is the theory of learning that you learn best when you have to solve problems rather than learn information passively."

Flight to Freedom allows the player to experience the stories of those who lived them. The database of over 750 entries created for the project was designed around the autobiographies and personal narratives of enslaved African-Americans who fled bondage in the south. Users are in fact able to "play" the role of famous narrative authors that Rael and his assistants studied, including Frederick Douglass and Harriett Tubman.

In the game, the player is presented with a scenario inspired by the contemporary, antebellum publications. The turn consists of the player choosing one out of several possible actions. For example, after having just been beaten after capture, should the player rest to recover strength or make another attempt at escape?

After the player decides on a course of action, the computer randomly selects an event entry from within certain parameters in the database. The ultimate object is to rescue your family members enslaved in the south and, then, to escape with them to Canada and freedom.

When asked about the inspiration for this project, Rael explained that he has been interested in educational simulation ever since graduate school. "Our students are growing up in a world of ever expanding media that constantly vie for their attention," he said. "It is crucial that educators take advantage of new technologies in order to both hold students attention and to address their wide variety of learning styles."

"Also," he admitted with a grin, "I like games." Still, historical simulations are much different than conventional computer games. As Rael said, they "challenge users to confront the past in a way that is fundamentally different from books and lectures. By establishing parameters for behavior and systems for incentives and rewards, simulations permit users to experience the problems and conflicts that motivated those in the past.

Originally imagining that Flight to Freedom would end up as a board game, the decision to turn it into a web-based simulation was reached in discussions between Rael, Schilling, and other members of ETC because of a computer's ability to make the in-game situations more specific and realistic. "A computer can keep track of various circumstances and can respond to various situations," said Rael. For example, certain events will only occur to women and others only in specific cities.

Rael and a group of student assistants assembled the database by researching historical documents. "Students did this work, and it was real historical work," Rael said. "They had to search documents, edit, and write entries."

Once the database had been assembled, a group of ETC web-designers and programmers under project head Kurt Greenstone undertook the task of creating the software aspect. Between research, writing and programming, well over 1,000 man-hours have been spent on the project so far, a number that will increase as Rael's future students continue to add additional entries to the game database.

"Without the ETC we couldn't possible have done this," Rael said. "The office is a model for how academics can translate their ideas into educational technology."

Each year, Schilling explained, the office selects three faculty proposals and then works with professors and students to merge academics and technology. Flight to Freedom is one of many projects the ETC is currently working on. Others include 'Zen Garden,' and a tool that will tailor the Introductory Biology curriculum to a student's personal learning preferences.

Rael hopes that his work will create excitement about using interactive methods to learn about the past. "So far, technology has not changed the way we learn about the past. The Internet is just used as an interesting way of conveying information in the way it always has been. We're trying to explore the interactivity of the web and the way we can learn from it."

Rael also intends for Flight to Freedom to serve as a nexus to inspire further investigations about African-American life by students, educators, and researchers.

If nothing else, the vivid images and stories within which the game enmeshes the player will bring color and life to a crucial aspect of our nation's history.
"When we include stories of the oppressed in our national story we are not simply adding voices," Rael said. "These stories challenge us to change the way we tell all our national stories."