FEDERATION FOR THE HUMANITIES AND SOCIAL SCIENCES
Montreal Student Wins National Competition for Relating Work on Benefits of Using Video Games to Rethink Learning and Digital Classrooms

A Montreal student's drive to demonstrate how video games can help students better conceptualize and personalize information assigned in the classroom has landed him a prestigious award from the Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council (SSHRC). Richy Srirachanikorn, a Masters student of Sociology and incoming PhD student of Social and Cultural Analysis at Concordia University, is one of five winners of the national 2023 Storytellers Challenge.

The annual competition - organized by SSHRC - drew the participation of hundreds of Canadian postsecondary students from coast to coast to coast. They were challenged to tell the story of how social sciences and humanities research is impacting our lives, our world and our future for the better.

Srirachanikorn's work - called The Allegorical Build: Material Allegories and Minecraft, based on The Allegorical Build project by Concordia University professors Dr. Bart Simon and Dr. Darren Wershler - demonstrates that interactions with video games such as Minecraft, the most popular game of all time, can promote a better understanding of class material when combined with allegory (the textual process of taking pre-learned material to impose an understanding of the new).

"Classrooms today aren't built with brick stone, walls and whiteboards. Since COVID-19, learning is no longer about what students can do inside a classroom, but with a classroom can do with its students," Srirachanikorn said. "Real learning and understanding are about using the texts around us and telling stories around them - students today aren't reading to remember anymore, they're reading to tell stories in order to understand."

As an example, Srirachanikorn pointed to learning about the history of capitalism. He argued that memorizing it from a textbook isn't easy. Imagine, instead, if students could really understand what it was like to live under that system by "playing" with it - harvesting wheat and potatoes, chopping down trees, finding materials to build a home and then a factory, and so on.

"Until now, you remember the readings of capitalist impulses, but only after playing to experience it, can you now understand how easy, how inevitable it was to walk a path like that," he said.

"This is not to say that video games can teach us about everything, but neither can classrooms," he added. "In this classroom of the Allegorical Build, everyone is the same because everyone has a story to tell. It is in this space where we don't pretend to remember, but we play to understand together."

Srirachanikorn explains that with more technological generations and world events to come, the Allegorical Build is poised to support the understanding of any subject needed.

To participate in SSHRC's Storyteller's Challenge, postsecondary students were tasked with featuring their own research or a professor's research project in a video or audio clip of up to three minutes, or a text or infographic no longer than 300 words. Their stories demonstrated the value of social sciences and humanities in improving lives.

The five winners were announced during the Congress of the Humanities and Social Sciences (Congress 2023), Canada's largest academic gathering and one of the most comprehensive in the world, taking place from May 27-June 2 at York University in Toronto.

Billed as a leading conference on the critical conversations of our time, Congress 2023 serves as a platform for the unveiling of thousands of research papers and presentations from social sciences and humanities experts worldwide. With more than 9,000 scholars, graduate students and practitioners participating, the event focuses on reckoning with the past and reimagining the future, with the goal of inspiring ideas, dialogue and action that create a more diverse, sustainable, democratic and just society. 

Organized by the Federation for the Humanities and Social Sciences in partnership with York University, Congress 2023 is sponsored by SSHRC, Universities Canada, the Canada Foundation for Innovation (CFI), Mitacs, SAGE Publishing, and University Affairs.