Simulations are one of my favorite teaching tools. They engage students in the way students and parents tend to call “fun.” That isn’t the only kind of engagement that matters, but it is, well, fun.
More importantly, simulations remind students of agency, both their own and that of the people they study. In a simulation, a student makes choices, makes mistakes, and has to think through a problem the way someone in the past would have. A simulation also reduces the pull of hindsight. Students are dropped into the complexity of the past and have to work through the real choices people faced, without knowing how things turned out. Freed from the ending, they’re better able to see how people made decisions in their own time, with limited information. The main challenge is balance: a well-built simulation gives students real agency without letting them drift into choices no one at the time could have made.
I prefer simulations that follow a core set of events along a set chronology. When students wander too far from the actual sequence of historical development, the activity drifts away from the learning goals. However, students also need to interact with the past and make real choices that have consequences. Through those choices, students practice and refine historical thinking. Otherwise, they are simply watching history unfold through a different medium.
I also avoid having students simulate well-known individuals. We know too much about people like Martin Luther or Charles V, and the pull of hindsight becomes too strong again for students to exercise agency. Instead, I want students to experience historical events from lesser known points of view and to notice that some positions gave people far more power to shape history than others, even though everyone was swept along by the same events.
This loose set of guidelines has shaped many of the simulations I’ve built over the last several years. In the past, I built them as large PowerPoints that students could work through in pairs or as a class. Some of those PowerPoints let students select a character, jump to that character’s slides, and experience the specific choices and consequences attached to them. There is always some sort of tracker that manages the outcomes of decisions and represents the danger embedded in events. Of course, this approach produces PowerPoints that can run a couple hundred slides, with complex linking and branching.
I have zero coding ability. But I can upload my simulations to Claude and ask it to design an HTML version of my simulation that opens in a browser. It is amazing to me how easy it is to upgrade one of my lessons, making it significantly more engaging.
The Simulation
I recently did this with my Reformation simulation.
The images of the five characters students can choose to play as are AI generated. Nearly every other image is a historical painting, woodcut, or engraving connected to the event students are experiencing, and each caption gives its date so students can see which images were made at the time and which came later. Instead of pre-teaching vocabulary, key words in the simulation can be clicked on to reveal their definition. The trackers for Standing, Safety, and Conscience are updated automatically after every choice. This makes running it in the classroom much easier and opens up more options for post-simulation enrichment.
If you have fifteen or twenty minutes, give it a try below. You can play in the embedded window or use the link underneath it to open the simulation in its own page. I’d love any feedback that would make it more meaningful for students.
Connections to Standards & Curriculum
This simulation was built for my AP World History course, specifically Unit 3. It speaks directly to Topic 3.3, which covers the Protestant Reformation’s break with existing Christian traditions and the Catholic Church’s response through the Counter-Reformation. It also supports Topic 3.2, where students examine how rulers used religion to legitimize and consolidate their power. Students see that process firsthand as princes seize church lands and the Peace of Augsburg hands them control over their subjects’ faith. Along the way, the simulation practices the AP historical thinking skills of contextualization and argumentation, along with the reasoning processes of causation, comparison, and continuity and change. Each event opens with its historical context, the three meters force students to weigh competing causes, and five characters living through the same decades make comparison a natural part of the debrief.
The simulation also fits the C3 Framework’s Inquiry Arc, especially as the launch of an inquiry. Students finish with genuine questions about what happened to their character, which become the supporting questions for a unit (Dimension 1). Its strongest connections are in Dimension 2, where students practice indicators such as D2.His.1.9-12, evaluating how historical events and developments were shaped by unique circumstances of time and place as well as broader historical contexts; D2.His.4.9-12, analyzing complex and interacting factors that influenced the perspectives of people during different historical eras; and D2.His.14.9-12, analyzing multiple and complex causes and effects of events in the past.
The simulation is designed as the opening of an inquiry, not the whole of it. The work of Dimensions 3 and 4, evaluating sources and building evidence-based arguments, can happen in a follow-up primary source activity, where students test what they experienced in the game against real documents.
Simulation Limits
Simulations have limits. Hindsight never fully disappears either, since students bring modern values and some sense of how things turned out into every decision. It takes a lot of practice with students to help them avoid the trap of hindsight. Even with practice, they can’t entirely do that.
Turning faith into a number on a meter weakens something people were willing to die for, and once students figure out the mechanics, some will start playing to win instead of thinking like someone in 1525. This is a problem I have never been able to fully account for in any of my simulations. Be mindful of these and prompt students to engage seriously so that the learning goals can be met.