Where History Has a Sense of Humor
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Rome Was Built on These. . . Spin the History Wheel
Rome was built on these. . . and with three letters on the board and $1,300 on the line, Player 1 knows exactly where this is going: SEVEN HILLS. Meet History Wheel, the newest duel on DuelingHistory.com. It’s a spin-the-wheel vocabulary game rebuilt from a 1993 ToolBook “Chapter Vocabulary” wheel game written by Stephen F.…
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Who Broke the Ming Vase? A Five-Part Unit on the Mandate of Heaven
It all started with a vase. A priceless Ming vase, one very bad moment, and a whole lot of broken porcelain. That little music video — “Junior” — got me thinking: why would anybody care that much about one vase? Answering that question turned into a whole unit on China’s dynasties, and the unit ends…
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Here Comes the Judge: Hammurabi Takes the Bench
If you are going to put Mesopotamia vocabulary on trial, you need a judge. And who better than the man who literally wrote the book on it? Around 1754 BCE, King Hammurabi of Babylon had 282 laws carved into a tall stone stele and set up where his people could see them. It is one…
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We Started That! Who Gave Us the Wheel, the Alphabet, and the Coin?
Eleven buckets, 32 cards: a free drag-and-drop game on what the smaller ancient kingdoms gave the world.
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Before the Rodeo, There Were the Minoans
Long before anybody climbed on a bull in a rodeo arena, young athletes on the island of Crete were grabbing charging bulls by the horns and flipping right over their backs. Meet the Minoans. Contributions of Early Cultures – Minoans is now live on Dueling History. Students start in the Palace of Knossos and click…
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“Can You See Anything?” Walk Into Tut’s Tomb With Howard Carter
On November 26, 1922, Howard Carter chipped a hole in a sealed doorway, held up a candle, and waited for his eyes to adjust. Behind him, Lord Carnarvon asked if he could see anything. “Yes, wonderful things.” Now your students can take the same walk: down sixteen steps, through a robber’s tunnel, past two black-and-gold…
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How Much Are You Willing to Risk? The Leap of Faith, 1999 to Now
The third game on my 1999 ToolBook CD was a bridge. Eleven stones over a black chasm, a doorway in the cliff, and a title in the loudest pink ToolBook had: The Third Challenge. Answer a question, step to the next stone. Reach the door and you win. It worked. Kids leaned toward the screen…
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Atticus, Boo, and a Mad Dog: Rivet Your Attention Goes to Maycomb
English teachers, this one’s for you. Every year somebody reads To Kill a Mockingbird, and every year somebody mixes up Miss Maudie and Calpurnia, or can’t say why a dog in the street matters. So I built a board for it. Rivet Your Attention puts every card face up. The pink cards are pictures: Atticus…
