Tuesday, April 7, 2009

What is Las Vegas Alive?

"LAS VEGAS ALIVE!" is an educational historical role-playing game designed to teach children what life was like for their ancestors at various times in the past, while giving them an opportunity to develop leadership, history, writing, performing, speech, and critical thinking skills. Through interactive role-playing students will learn about the history of Las Vegas, and generate pride in their current community.

The game will have six primary decks of cards: 1.) Character: name, gender, age, and photo; 2.) Occupation; 3.) Culture; 4.) Religion; 5.) Artifacts; and 6.) Quests. Students will receive one card from decks 1-4 and 6. They will be given 3 cards from deck 5. Using all of these cards, players will develop their character. A character development form for the  game will be available (soon) on the website for those wanting a little extra help. The form will ask questions to help players think about who their character was, and how all the cards relate to that character.

Questions include: How are these artifacts used by your character? How many people are in your family? How does your ethnicity or culture relate to your occupation, gender, family, and religion? What tools are used in your occupation? How and why did your family come to the Las Vegas area? How do you interact with other members of your community? What kind of social issues do you face and how did you deal with them?

After taking time to answer questions and develop their characters, each player presents his or her self as their character, giving as much detail as possible. These presentations will be videotaped. The videotaped characters can then be viewed by peers, family (often including grandparents in area) and friends. After presenting their characters, players will receive their quest card, and all players will interact IN CHARACTER to fulfill their individual quests.  An example of an individual quest is: "You need food for you (and your family).  Find someone to buy food, or if you don't have enough money, find ways to barter or work for food."


Once individiual quests are accomplished all the players will come back together and complete a campaign as a community. The campaign will be based on a real historical event, and each character/player will need to find a way to participate.  As a group, the players, still IN CHARACTER, decide how the community and each individual fits in to the campaign.  (I will post an example campaign soon.) 

This project includes lesson plans  developed with assistance from a humanities consultant. There are also accompanying materials to give examples of characters, presentations, and solutions. The time period for this initial project is 1821-1878, and we are working on a different set of cards for 1879-1919.

I'm looking for people to volunteer to play the game as testers.  We have a small group of adults meeting Monday morning at 10am at the museum to play.  If you would like to participate please let me know.  Also, if you know of any 5th - 8th graders who can come test the game out please make arrangements with me to bring them down to play.  This is our target audience.

For questions about Las Vegas Alive! or to make arrangements to play contact me, Nellie Price Museum Educator at (505) 454-1401 ext 283 or email me at nellie.price@gmail.com.

Thank you!!