Mission: Mexica

In Mission Mexica, students are acting as secret agents called Pochteca (a Nahuatl word that referred to long-distance messengers, who also sometimes acted as spies), employed by The Empire Elite, an organization dedicated to repatriating stolen art and artefacts.

Mission: Mexica is a game-based approach to learning about worldviews before, during, and after the the Spanish conflict with the Mexica (Aztec) people in Mesoamerica.

Through the past several years, we tried a bunch of different approaches to teaching the case study of the Spanish and Mexica conquest, and hadn't yet landed on something that we loved. One of the biggest problems is that when applying the concept of game-like learning to a conflict such as this one, we often ended up with a game that felt very colonial.

Mission: Mexica is our latest attempt, and. we think we've landed on something we can now iterate. The game has three parts: Basic Training, Case Maps, and the Heist. Due to several factors, the most important being a lack of time to document this, the Heist section in our teacher's guide is not yet complete. We will continue to work on this and will update it when we can. We have confidence in your creativity, though, that even if you give this a try, you will come up with something great for your Heist portion of the game.

Within the Teacher's Guide, you'll find pedagogical reasoning and links to all the resources and materials we've developed so far.

UPDATE: In 2023, we found ourselves needing to do a bit of a redesign of Missio: Mexica. Firstly, we found ourselves short on time, so we adapted the Case Fi;e section of the project and instead of 4 weeks, we completed 3 weeks of Case Maps. Our other significant update was to adapt the Heist from a grade-wide outdoor event to a class-based competition. The resulting Heist ended up being really fun and solved a lot of the problems we had when we did it outside with the whole grade 8 population. We have updated the Teacher's Guide and the resources we share within to reflect these changes.