An interactive history game for 8th grade North Carolina History
"I travelled through a country where I never had the pleasure of beholding before, the most beautiful natural prospects I had ever seen in my life." John Lawson, A New Voyage to Carolina, 1709
On December 28, 1700, John Lawson departed Charles Town on a journey that would take him 550 miles through the Carolina interior. He was a naturalist, a surveyor, and an observer. He was also walking through a world on the edge of catastrophic change.
This game puts students inside that world: reading his maps, navigating his compass, surveying his land grants, and hearing the voices his journal left out.
Most 8th grade history materials give students the colonial perspective. This game gives them the colonial perspective, the Indigenous perspective, and the perspective of enslaved Africans — simultaneously, in the same story.
Built around Lawson's real 1709 journal. Students read actual passages, interrogate what he chose to record, and ask what he left out.
Two fictional companions, Nora and Attamuskeet, give voice to the enslaved African and Indigenous experiences that Lawson's journal could not include.
Map reading, coordinate systems, surveying, source analysis. Students build real historical thinking skills while playing, not just memorizing facts.
The subject is note-taking. History is the vehicle.
Most students fail at note-taking not because they cannot learn — but because no one has explicitly taught them how to pull information from text, decide what matters, organize it, and compress it into something they can actually use. This tool teaches those skills directly, using NC History content as the practice material.
No login. No student data collected. Works on any device.
Ed History Games is building a library of interactive history experiences for NC classrooms. Each game is built by educators, for educators.
Whether you're a teacher who wants to pilot the game, a district curriculum director interested in licensing, a grant organization exploring educational technology, or a student with feedback — we want to hear from you.
This project is actively in development. Your feedback directly shapes what gets built next.