Creative Conflict: Reacting to the Past Roleplaying Games in the Introductory Statistics Classroom

Reacting to the Past is a game-based pedagogy in which students take on roles in a broader historical conflict with elements of game fiction, competition, and collaboration. This paper introduces two Reacting to the Past games developed for introductory statistics courses: “The Cigarette Century”: Tobacco and Lung Cancer, 1964-1965 and Cholera! at the Pump: Contagionism, Miasma Theory and Sanitation, London 1854. Both games are used to teach specific statistical content including measures of risk, data visualization, and hypothesis testing while also using historical context and real datasets to emphasize statistical thinking and provide relevance. Reacting to the Past games as high impact practices are strongly in alignment with the 2016 GAISE recommendations including conceptual understanding, use of real data, and active learning. Both games were implemented in an “Applied Statistics for the Biological Sciences” course at a public four-year university. Students enrolled in the course (N = 115 over five semesters from Spring 2023 to Spring 2025) were primarily juniors or seniors (63%) and Biology or Human Health Science majors (75%). Assessment of performance in the games is based on portfolios that include scaffolded background research, posters presentations, labs, and reflections. Course evaluations show students generally found the games to be fun, interactive, and effective at teaching statistical thinking, although some students struggled with historical language, workload, and complexity of the projects. Both the Cigarette Century and Cholera 1854 games and additional games are available through the Reacting Consortium by instructor subscription ($25-$150 annually, income-based). The student-facing game books discussed in this paper are reproduced in the Supplementary Materials with permission from the authors and publisher. In addition, full game materials for Cigarette Century and Cholera 1854 are available at no cost on the Reacting website for one month following the publication of this article in a Journal’s Issue.