Abstract
This study assesses student feedback from the implementation of Assassin’s Creed: Odyssey as a teaching tool in a lower level, general education Classics course (CLAS 160B1: Meet the Ancients: Gateway to Greece and Rome). In this course, which ran in Fall 2021, students were given the option to choose either a video game-based assignment sequence or a traditional reading response assignment sequence. Both assignment sequences required similar activities and output: reading primary and secondary source literature, reflecting on a question prompt, and writing an essay in response to the prompt. The primary difference was that students who opted for the video game sequence also completed a series of tasks within the video Assassin’s Creed: Odyssey. After the course, students were provided with a short quantitative and qualitative survey in which they could reflect upon their learning experience, and these results were then compared between the students who opted for the video game-based assignment sequence and the more traditional assignment sequence. Preliminary results show that students who opted for the video game assignment sequence gave, on average, higher ratings with regard to their enjoyment of the course assignments and with regard to the amount of learning they felt they achieved. This suggests that the implementation of video game-based pedagogy may be a useful strategy for history, archaeology, and classics courses in the future. Caution is urged, however, due to the small sample size, the non-random sampling strategy, and the lack of objective learning outcome measurement.