8th Grade Social Studies classes at the Hanover Middle School do not look or sound like your typical social studies class. Yes, you will still hear discussions taking place about early civilizations, cultural diffusion, and causes and results of famous wars, but you will also see students actively engaged in experiencing how people from the past spent their leisure time.

The course is called Evolution of Games and is the pre-requisite course for a series of classes to be implemented by the Hanover High School next school year. The courses are intended to teach students how to design their own games. The offerings will eventually include game production and marketing, game maker programming and screenwriting courses.

The Evolution of Games course utilizes student collaboration as a basis for its learning. Students work in IDEA (Innovate, Design, Engage and Assess) Teams to study early civilizations and important time periods throughout history, re-create ancient game boards, play the games, and assess how cultural beliefs and behaviors impacted the design of the games. Through these activities, students are able to make correlations between the games played, the technology available during the time periods, and to the type of governmental and religious influences on the societies.