Mark Carnes was convinced that his students were as bored as he was. His philosophy course on great books had all the right ingredients for a fascinating discussion, but something just wasn't clicking.

His remedy? He threw his class into a mock trial of Socrates, to show how the philosopher's writings emerged from important, heartfelt debates. Eventually, a student suggested adding rules about who could talk, sit, or stand – according to the traditions of the time.

It worked. Students took the class seriously and started to research their roles. Mr. Carnes, then a graduate student at Columbia University in New York, even added a competitive element by giving the "winners" a boost in their grade.

Now Carnes is a history professor at Barnard, a women's college affiliated with Columbia and the site of a recent workshop for about 40 professors and students from other schools who are interested in replicating the "Reacting to the Past" seminars.

"This game gets kids engaged in an extreme, intense way," says Frank Kirkpatrick, a religion professor and a dean at Trinity College who recruited a few colleagues to come with him to the training.

In Reacting classes, designed for first-year students, the professor is a gamemaster who sits out of the main arena and lets students run the proceedings. They make speeches and carry on debates in character. Gamemasters can intervene to keep the group on track, but most of their involvement is outside class, where they help students develop strategy and do research. Grading is based on the inevitable class participation and written work – speeches, memorials, sermons, and other prose.

The games center on periods in history when there was an upheaval of the existing order. Students are assigned readings – both broadly and for their specific roles. They base their actions on facts, but rather than merely reenact history, they redirect it according to their will and interaction.

Carnes's students have come a long way from those first giggling mock trials. Now they burrow into texts with a vengeance, rake the library for extra ammunition, hold secret strategy sessions at all hours, and fret over how to stay in power or protect their interests.

Professors from Barnard and elsewhere helped Carnes develop games in various historical settings, and funding for the project came partly from the US Department of Education. Students, too, make contributions to the curriculum. The game "Democracy at the Threshold: Athens in 403 BC" started with 10 pages of material and now has about 120.

"I've never encountered another class where almost every student wants to speak, wants to be there, and is excited," says Violet Durollari, a former student and later a teaching assistant for the class. She remembers a time when she and her classmates found a note on the door that class was cancelled because the professor couldn't make it. "We looked around and said, 'Everyone is here, we may as well hammer out some of these issues.' And we sat there without a professor."

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