"A fun and engaging strategy to make the study of Ancient Egypt come alive for your students."

The study of ancient Egypt, with its focus on pharaohs, mummies, the afterlife, hieroglyphic messages, and the pyramid and its contents, have peeked the curiosity of students for centuries. As this same curiosity and interest intensifies in your students as the result of the recent United States visit of the treasures of King Tut’s Tomb, allow your students to experience the learning, skills, excitement, curiosity, and, at the same time, foreboding associated with becoming members of an archeological team that travels through a dark and dusty tomb called a pyramid. The curriculum plan that will guide your teaching strategies to reach this student objective is the classroom simulation game--MUMMY’S MESSAGE™.

Seven years of research was devoted to the design and development of this simulation game. Every attempt has been made to make each experience encountered by your students as authentic as my research dictated. Much of the research base for this simulation focused on National Geographic Magazines, archeological journals and texts.

Besides exposing your students to interesting and fascinating facts about ancient Egyptian culture, the MUMMY’S MESSAGE™ classroom simulation game allows each of your students to experience the thrills, frustrations, and horrible dangers as they become archeologists traveling through the interior of a pyramid. The 50 Problem Cards and the possible impact that facing these dangers have on the expeditionary teams’ successful progress through the pyramid, took three years of research alone. As your students will soon discover, archeological expeditions into pyramids encountered many physical and emotional challenges as the result of the sadistic mind of the pyramid builder, who incorporated deadly traps in order to frustrate and confuse grave robbers.

Three student groups are created, each with two competing archeological teams (approximately five students per team). The teams progress through the pyramid by correctly answering Question Cards, selecting a Passage Progress Card and collecting Hieroglyphic Cards, each with a hieroglyphic symbol and the translation of that symbol. Although most of the symbols were created to resemble actual hieroglyphics, the simulated experiences encountered as your students collect, piece together, and correctly translate a real message from a hieroglyphic tablet, is authentic.

The goal of the two competing archeological teams is to travel to each of the three chambers; the Pharaoh’s Burial Chamber, the Queen’s Burial Chamber and the Great Hall. As each chamber is entered, a piece or several pieces of a Hieroglyphic Tablet is/are discovered. Using the Hieroglyphic Cards accumulated, the team that can correctly piece together and translate the MUMMY’S MESSAGE™ wins the simulation game.