You arrive for your first day of Latin class. At first it seems no different from any other class you’ve ever started. How can you know that from this moment forward your world will change completely? Or that you will be responsible for helping to save civilization from forces seeking to destroy it?
Our mission
The Pericles Group wants to transform education at every level by answering the eternal question “Why are we learning this?” in a completely new and completely engaging way–a way that paradoxically comes from the ancient world. The Pericles Group’s practomimetic courses give students the chance to explore learning as a narrative and as a game. When students explore that way, their attitudes and behaviors change along with their level of knowledge, and they become active learners, on their own mission to use their learning to make the world a better place. The metaphor of a practomimetic course–that by learning the material the student will save the universe–becomes a reality through the power of imagination.
What we do
Founded in 2010, The Pericles Group, LLC, provides game-based (in our terms, practomimetic) learning solutions for learners, teachers, and administrators in a wide range of situations and a variety of disciplines.
TPG partners with teachers, providing resources to develop and deliver materials for game-based courses and curricula. Our role in the process is similar to that of a traditional textbook publisher, but the services we provide make old-fashioned textbooks seem not just old-fashioned but also entirely inadequate to the challenges and enormous opportunities of teaching as a digitally-enhanced practice. TPG practomimes don’t look like video games as you’re used to thinking of video games, but they play like video games and they teach even better than video games can: while video games can only teach players to play video games, practomimetic courses teach their students to play the curriculum–that is, to reach the learning objectives of the curriculum and to master the skills and content the TPG practomime is designed to foster.
What is practomime?
Practomime is a new word for what stories, games, and many other kinds of works of art have in common: they all involve creative activity in a cultural zone regulated for play. In plain language, that means that the Iliad and the Odyssey are really the same kind of thing as some of the most popular video games today.
The ancient Greeks learned most of the stuff that made them able to found Western Civilization from Homer. Kids and grown-ups playing video games are learning a lot more than most people think.
When you realize the learning potential of video games–the educational theorist James Paul Gee says for example “A video game is nothing but an assessment”–you start to see that instead of fighting to bring games into the classroom, we should probably be fighting to turn the classroom into a game–or, to be more precise, a practomime. That’s where practomimetic learning begins.