How well can your students think like historians?

This revamped ActiveHistory Black Death simulation turns a medieval plague into a fast-paced 20-minute historical skills challenge for Grade 6 students. Rather than simply testing factual recall, students tackle a series of challenges designed to measure three key areas of historical thinking:

?? Visual Literacy — interpreting maps and images as historical evidence
? Source Analysis — identifying and interpreting what historical sources reveal
? Historical Reasoning — weighing evidence, spotting mistakes and making informed decisions

Students work through 20 self-marking challenges, receiving immediate feedback as they go. Their results are automatically broken down into the three skill areas, giving both student and teacher a much clearer picture of where they are succeeding and where they need to develop.

And there’s a useful bonus for teachers: at the end, the simulation automatically generates a personalised performance comment, based on the student’s results, which can be copied directly into a markbook or reporting system.

A fun activity for students — but one that gives teachers meaningful evidence of historical skills, not just a score.