Judkin Browning | Of Water Balloons and History: Using Wargames as Active Learning Tools to Teach the Historical Process | The History Teacher, 42.3

Of Water Balloons and History: Using Wargames as Active Learning Tools to Teach the Historical Process

Judkin Browning
Appalachian State University

EACH FALL SEMESTER, on the first day of class of my upper-level American Military History course, I inform my students that a major part of the class consists of a wargame in which they will participate. I describe briefly how the class will be divided into two teams, and that on a specific evening during the fourth week of class, we will engage in battle at a park on campus known as Durham Park. The only weapons that they are allowed to use are water balloons. I also tell them that their final paper for the class "will have something to do" with the wargame, but I remain deliberately vague when pressed for details. For most, the knowledge that they will get to participate in a water balloon fight generates a good deal of excitement and enthusiasm for the course. What they do not immediately recognize is that they will be actively learning the historical method by participating in a historical event and then analyzing it afterwards.

Pedagogy

History is about the process of engaging in the historical method as much as it is about any factual information that one may find. Utilizing the historical method involves locating, appraising, and employing evidence to reconstruct and understand the past. The wargame allows students to participate in every step of this process, as their ultimate assignment is to research and write an analytical paper of a historical battle; it just happens to be a battle in which they participated. I frequently tell my students that the job of a historian is to "impose order on the chaos." Historians must analyze a host of often conflicting and contradictory sources about their subject, written by humans who had their own overt or hidden agendas and their own biases influencing how they viewed a particular event.

In order to give my students a taste of how conflicting accounts can cloud our understanding of a historical event, I assign chapter four of Paul E. Kopperman's work, Braddock at the Monongahela (1977), in which he depicts the French and Indian massacre of General Edward Braddock's British Army near modern-day Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania, on July 9, 1755. Kopperman skillfully utilizes all available eyewitness accounts from the event to paint what turns out to be a confusing picture of the battle. By analyzing the conflicting accounts, Kopperman demonstrates how individual soldiers and officers intentionally and unintentionally biased their accounts in order to depict their own performance in the best possible light or to damage those against whom they held grudges. As a result, we can never know exactly what happened in those woods on that July afternoon, because there are too many contradictory accounts about the nature of the terrain, the opening of the battle, its flow, its length, its tactics, and ultimately those responsible for the outcome. My students always come away from the reading with a greater appreciation that history is not black and white, and that there are many shades of gray even while trying to depict an arguably small event.¹

While the Kopperman essay is an excellent example of how the historical process works, having students read it is, nevertheless, a passive form of learning, and its lessons may not adhere. By engaging in the wargame, however, students are actively learning the very lessons that Kopperman puts forth. In pedagogical terms, the wargame assignment combines both active and interactive learning processes, which allows for a much higher degree of comprehension and knowledge retention. Students actively create the historical event and then interact not only with their peers, but also with the historical sources in order to write a cogent history. They respond to the learning material through their analysis and interpretation of the historical sources. The historical process becomes transparent for students, as they can see every step along the way of how historians practice their craft: they experience the chaotic event itself; they participate in the creation of the primary sources about the event; and they have to evaluate the often conflicting sources in order to offer their interpretation as to why one team won or lost the battle. In other words, they have to "impose order on the chaos" of evidence about their historical event.

The assignment has other intrinsic factors that make it appealing to the professor. Students learn to a much greater degree the intricacies of researching and writing than they would if they wrote just another research paper on an actual historical event. In my experience, regardless of any strict parameters I attempt to set for traditional research papers, students still prefer to rely—exclusively, if they can manage it—on internet sources. Inevitably, there are higher incidences of fraud and plagiarism in these papers, as students blur the line between what is proper research and what is improper appropriation of someone else's work. Refreshingly, the wargame research assignment affords practically no possibility of plagiarism, other than foolishly copying a classmate's paper, which is easy for the instructor to spot.

The wargame would be a natural fit for any course that deals with warfare, but also for any survey-level course whose instructor wishes for the students to engage in the process of primary source research and writing. I originally conceived the idea for a class on the Civil War, but found American Military History to be an even more logical fit when I began teaching this course at Appalachian State University. I also intend to use the results of the wargame as active learning assignments for future survey courses as an introduction to primary sources and making analytical arguments.

Mechanics of the Wargame

Though I will describe the mechanics of the wargame as I designed it, I would encourage instructors to add, remove, or modify the parameters I have established in order to best fit their learning goals. In the first class meeting after the semester's registration period officially closes, I divide the group of students into two equal teams. In my most recent class of forty, I had sixteen cadets of the Reserve Officers Training Corps (ROTC), so I separated the class into two teams of twenty, each with eight ROTC cadets. In my case, I always divide the two teams into Team Appalachian State and Team Georgia (because I earned my Ph.D. from the University of Georgia). I inform the students when and where the battle will take place—at 6:00 p.m. on a specific day of the week at a park on our campus—and then I explain the rules.

The rules of the wargame are fairly simple. Each team will have a flag to defend. The object of the game is to capture the other team's flag. They cannot use any electronic devices (e.g., cell phones) to communicate. On a certain level, the wargame is equivalent to a Civil War-era battle, with low rates of fire and no modern technological devices to aid the participants. However, the only projectile "weapons" allowed are water balloons. Students can utilize whatever non-electrical- or non-gasoline-powered devices they wish to help propel those balloons through the air. Each participant will also be wearing a flag football belt, which consists of three colored flags hanging from a waist-belt (I bought the flags in the sports department at a local retail store). A person is declared hit and therefore "wounded" and disqualified from the game if he/she is either struck anywhere on his/her person by a water balloon (it does not have to explode to count as a hit) or has his/her flag pulled off by an opponent. Should they be "wounded," players must immediately sit or lie at their location and cannot speak for the rest of the engagement. This adds a degree of realism as the battle progresses and the human detritus of battle remain on the field to become obstacles or distractions. As enticement or motivation, I offer a reward for the winning team members. Thus far, the reward has been 5 points added to the first exam or the equivalent of one percentage point added to their final grade.

Once I explain the rules, I separate the two teams into different classrooms and instruct each team to elect a captain for the battle. The teams also begin the preliminary stages of their preparation and battle planning at this time. The captains are charged with organizing their respective teams as they deem fit and for scouting the battlefield terrain, plotting strategy, and gathering supplies and ammunition. Immediately after this class in which the teams are divided, I meet with the elected team captains to review the rules again as well as discuss special instructions for them. I insist that each team captain send me a blind e-mail copy of any communications they have with their respective teams. I tell them not to inform the team that they are doing so. This provides a paper trail that allows students to examine the planning (or lack thereof) that went into the battle when they write their histories. In addition to requiring the e-mails from team captains, I also recruit one or two students on each team to keep a journal of the planning activities in which they participate. I allow them to keep the diaries anonymously, especially if they have negative comments to make about their team leaders or fellow combatants. This also helps shed light on the pre-battle planning and humanizes the preparatory process, removing it from the sterile plotting of strategy and offering personal opinions and judgments by those who were involved. In a further effort to humanize the participants and the process, I require each member of the class to write a three-page autobiography so that students can benefit from the biographical information for each participant when they write their histories. This also gives me the opportunity to evaluate their writing styles early in the semester and offer suggestions for improvement.

I enlist a number of "neutral observers" for the wargame—the equivalent of the foreign military attachés who observed many of the battles of the American Civil War. These neutral observers, who are typically fellow professors, act as referees during the wargame to make sure that each participant obeys the rules. The observers also are required to write their own after-battle accounts of what they saw. In this way, the students have as many as six eyewitness accounts from observers who had no allegiance to either team. Finally, I procure the aid of one or two people to act as photographers and take action shots of the battle. I cull a select few photographs (no more than twelve) and include them in the research files, so students can utilize them when researching and writing their papers.

Finally, after approximately three weeks of planning and preparation, the wargame takes place. In 2007, the event took place on Wednesday, September 19 at 6:00 p.m. Team Appalachian had two students who could not attend the battle at all (one had a class conflict and one felt obligated to attend a Dave Matthews Band concert), while a third student arrived ten minutes late and was disqualified from participating. So, outnumbered twenty to seventeen, and having not engaged in nearly as much strategic planning as Team Georgia, Team Appalachian lost the battle in a mere fourteen minutes. Their cause was not helped by the fact that their team captain was the very first casualty of the battle, getting hit less than one minute into the fight. After inflicting numerous casualties on their opponent, Team Georgia launched a full assault on the Appalachian Team's base and carried away the enemy's flag, thus claiming victory.

In the next class period after the wargame, each participant writes an account of his or her experience in the battle, either in the form of a letter to a loved one or a more official after-action report. The participants are free to comment on what they observed, felt, or heard at the battle, and they also have full license to censure or praise any fellow team member's performance as they wish. The only two stipulations of the assignment are that all participants have to write their full accounts within a certain time limit (usually thirty minutes) and they have to end their individual accounts at the point at which they were wounded. For those who were wounded in the first few moments of the battle, the letters are often brief, or full of censures of those they feel responsible for their personal demise.

Now that the students have engaged in the concrete and outwardly "fun" part of the wargame, they have to begin the "hard" yet similarly rewarding part of the historical reckoning. Their assignment is to write a research paper (ten to twenty pages) on the battle, answering the historical question: Why did Team X win (or conversely, why did Team Y lose)? In addition, I require that they try to account for everyone on the battlefield. This additional requirement more fully engages their historical detective skills. The research for the paper becomes a logic problem, as they have to use the written accounts and few photographs to reconstruct the ebb and flow of the battle, pointing out where each person was along the way. However, for classes in which this would be too time-consuming, one can throw in specific questions that will require less protracted sleuthing, such as "Whatever happened to Randolph Scott?" or "Who shot J.R.?"

The students conduct their research using the archival collection that I create from the sources. The files in this collection consist of pre-battle e-mails and diaries, post-battle letters and reports, neutral observers' accounts, photographs, and medical files. In this last file, I identify those who did not live beyond the battle. I read every participant's letter and determine who would have been "killed" in the battle. Basing it on the likelihood of survival during the Civil War, I consider anyone who was hit in the head or in the torso to have been "killed in action." I remove these letters from the research files. Culling out the "dead" from the accounts provides another level of realism and comprehension of the nature of battle—as students realize that those who died in battle may have had very useful things to say about the engagement, but they did not get a chance to record them. Several students have commented that this makes them view military history in a new light, as they become aware of the thousands of voices that were silenced in battle and never got a chance to tell their story.

To add an even deeper level of realism, I also instructed a student who was unable to attend the battle to write a false account as if she was actually there. She gathered her sketchy knowledge of the battle from listening to others talk about it, and then she crafted her own phony narrative, placing herself at the battle. In doing this, I was actually replicating historical practice. Several "eyewitness" accounts from history have been written by people who only experienced the event vicariously through others. In my own field of expertise, the model example is that of Theodore Gerrish, a private in the 20th Maine Infantry Regiment, who wrote a detailed first-person account of that regiment's famous role on Little Round Top on the second day of the battle of Gettysburg. His postwar memoir, in which he recounted his regiment's experience holding the Union left flank at the pivotal battle, became one of the most often cited works by historians on the engagement thanks to his detailed descriptions and rhetorical flourishes. However, Gerrish fooled some highly skilled historians because his dramatic eyewitness account was bogus. Gerrish was in a hospital in Philadelphia on July 2, 1863, and missed the entire Gettysburg campaign. By having a student write a disingenuous first-person account of the Battle of Durham Park, I was forcing my students to use the same scrutiny of their sources that historians should, but sometimes fail to apply.²

While the way I constructed the sources imparts a certain level of realism to the research assignment, I also try to make the research experience more authentic by requiring the students go to the University's Special Collections reading room to do their wargame research in the collection. I provide multiple copies of the wargame's archival collection to the archives, and I do not allow photocopying, forcing students to learn how to take notes on the most salient and revealing points of the letters. They also have to manage their time wisely, because they have to sign up for times to go to the Special Collections reading room, which has limited seating space and specific hours of operation (9:00 a.m. to 4:00 p.m., Monday through Friday at Appalachian State).³ I require abbreviated rough drafts (usually about five pages) one month before the final product is due. On these drafts, I offer copious comments, criticisms, and suggestions to help them refine their research, writing, and analytical skills. This allows students to gauge how they are progressing, and to focus on the areas in which they are weakest.

Student Assessments of the Assignment

The feedback on the assignment from the students has been overwhelmingly positive. The fall semester of 2007 was the second year that I used the wargame, but it was the first time that I had students write an evaluation of this specific assignment in order to assess its value to them. All thirty-eight respondents found the wargame to be a valuable learning experience. Of the thirty-eight respondents, thirty-two also found the paper assignment to be a positive and constructive experience. The paper is a non-traditional research assignment that emphasizes the historical process over the acquisition of content; it teaches the skills of researching, analyzing sources, and writing, but does not impart any significant historical knowledge. This unusual teaching technique, understandably, can be difficult for some students to appreciate. Five of the six dissenters were ROTC cadets, and they stated that they would have preferred to write a paper on "an actual battle." However, eleven ROTC cadets found the exercise an instructive one and gave the assignment a positive review. One ROTC cadet, Matt Richardson (now a second lieutenant in the National Guard), who was also an education major, made the argument for the wargame over a real battle: "Even though it was not a real battle, it made things easier to get excited about because you had first-hand experience in the making of this paper."⁴ When some of his fellow cadets claimed that the paper assignment "was pointless for their knowledge," Richardson asserted, "I disagreed saying that if they were able to research this they could research anything and that this was a good way of teaching those techniques without it being the same old history class." Another cadet agreed, advising me: "If you were to be pressured to change anything about this project by the ROTC department, in my opinion, I think telling them to get lost would be the best course of action."

Certain themes emerge from the students' evaluations of the assignment, as they discovered that the exercise introduced or enhanced several important fundamental skills. First and foremost, they found they had to learn how to conduct research, which consisted of discovering how to read the primary sources for useful content as well as how to take purposeful notes. They had to develop their organization skills, sharpen their analytical skills, and refine their writing skills in order to answer the assignment's questions satisfactorily. Along the way, many students were introduced to archival research for the first time, and many found that the requirement to do research at the archives lent an air of authenticity to the assignment, as they felt they were acting as professional historians. Several students referred to the process as that of acting as historical detective, as they reconstructed the battle by analyzing as many primary source accounts as possible in order to craft a coherent narrative for their paper. A majority appreciated the unique nature of the assignment and commented that they felt a significant sense of achievement once they had finished the paper. Many praised the assignment as the most entertaining or enjoyable paper that they had written.

Before writing the paper, students had to engage in rather intensive research. One student declared, "I honestly feel that this assignment was a brilliant way to teach and introduce students to historical research methods... If our class had been given an assignment to write an extensive research paper on a battle we covered in class, I think it would not have had the personal appeal this particular paper had." Another student recognized the authentic nature of the research process when she had to read the handwritten documents of her fellow students: "Historians do not always have the pleasure of being provided with documents to interpret that are well written and perfectly laid out." She claimed (and nearly every historian can empathize with her), "I had a difficult time with some of the handwriting, which closely resembled chicken scratch."

Not only did reading bad handwriting make the students feel they were doing genuine research, but many students also commented that doing the research on the original documents in the archives exposed them to a world they had never known before. History major Jamie Walker argued, "Having to do research from the archives gave the assignment a realistic aspect that would not have been gained had we just gone and gotten books and did research on our own." A classmate agreed that "going to the Special Collections gave the paper a more serious manner." One even lamented that he had never set foot in an archives before, declaring, "It was the first time I had ever been to an archive in my entire life, and as a senior history major in college, I actually found it a little sad that it was my first time." Walker was so impressed by the archival experience that she concluded, "if a teacher assigned a project like this and did not make the students do their research in the [archives], he or she would be doing a disservice to their students."

Conducting research using so many individual letters and accounts forced the students to strengthen their organizational skills. One student perceptively asserted, "Organization was very important to this project... If I had not organized my notes in the research process and created an outline while writing, my paper would have been terrible." A classmate agreed that good organization of notes was important "because there was so much information that had to be weeded out and condensed into relevant information." Another student realized that refining her organizational skills led her to engage in a greater depth of analysis: "I found that I was beginning to think more of why these events occurred as they did, and not just pulling facts out of primary sources as one does with a normal research paper."

The most important aspect of any research paper is that the students begin to engage in critical analysis of their sources in order to write a cogent thesis about their subject. The wargame allowed students to discover how crucial those analytical skills are in order to write a comprehensible paper. One student wrote, "I learned that when you write history you have to read everything you can get your hands on about the event and then figure it out for yourself." He discovered how challenging it was to come to a definite conclusion, because as he read the differing accounts, he "realized that things can be exaggerated or not all true." Another student wrote, "Part of what made it enjoyable to research and write the history of the battle was the fact that I lived the event and this project forced me to reflect on what happened." He shared his classmates' discovery that many accounts offer conflicting views of the same event: "Turns out, my view of what happened was quite different from what a lot of my classmates saw." One student appreciated the challenging nature of the assignment. She wrote, "I enjoy analyzing, so when the time came to explain why things went on in the battle, I was more motivated to write because it actually involved a challenging thinking process." She felt that this paper challenged her more than previous assignments, as she claimed, "In my experience, the history papers I've been forced to write have always been dry and have only needed fact without having room for explanation or inventive thinking."

Professors wish that every research paper assignment stimulated their students to engage in "inventive" thinking, because research papers should require students to engage in a high level of critical reasoning to piece together chronologies or construe motivations from historical actors in order to reach defensible conclusions. The wargame assignment—particularly the requirement that the students try to account for everyone who participated in the battle—prompted many students to refer to themselves as historical sleuths. One student wrote, "It was almost like being a detective, reading through people's personal accounts and looking at the photographs to find out what happened." Another commented, "It was almost like putting puzzle pieces together to see who was talking about what in their letters." She also recognized the central irony of historical writing: "I learned that one event can be interpreted in many different ways." Another participant noted, "it was important to cross reference every account against every other account to be sure that each participant was giving a truthful representation of what they saw." He recognized another crucial component of doing historical research—the overt or hidden agendas of those who create the sources. He noted, "[E]veryone adds their own little bit of bias to what they see, so sometimes it was difficult to wade through the BS and get at the heart of the matter." Indeed, many professional historians share that lament.

Other students recognized the unique challenges to writing history, as well as the distinctiveness of this assignment. One commented, "Spending as much time as I did wrapped up in these sources also turned my classmates into seemingly fictional people. Clayton Quamme [the leader of the victorious team] transformed into a military legend in my mind by the end of this, because I spent so much time staring at letters that said so." He reflected the same problems that many historians encounter; it is often difficult not to become too close to one's subject and fall under the sway of particularly eloquent correspondents, and as a result lose a certain necessary detachment from the subject. Despite the difficult nature of the assignment, students generally shared the sentiment that the exercise was "a healthy brain endeavor. This paper was the most fun 15 pages I've written." Another wrote that the project was so stimulating: "If given the chance, I would do this project over again. This is the only paper or project that I have ever wanted to try to do over again."

A few students noted that the authentic aspects of this assignment reflected the larger difficulties of doing historical research. One ROTC cadet wrote, "[the assignment] taught me that it is pretty much impossible to get an exact picture of what happened on the battlefield. This is not only because everyone can have different opinions of what happened, but also, because the dead can't really speak." Clayton Quamme, at the time an ROTC cadet, but now a second lieutenant in the Army, agreed that the specific variables of this assignment made it as genuine as possible: "It was the details like excluding people that died in the battle from the records and creating false accounts that gave students the opportunity to fully understand the many challenges historians face."

Their engagement in the historical process gave my students a new appreciation for what historians do, imparted upon them the skills necessary to conduct research, analyze sources, develop a thesis, and write a cogent narrative, as well as left them with a sense of fulfillment for having successfully finished a difficult assignment. One student shared, "After finishing, I had a great sense of accomplishment in knowing that I was capable of doing something so big." A ROTC cadet agreed that the end result made him appreciate all that he had done. After informing me not to change anything about the assignment, despite how much others may complain, he placed the experience in an unusual perspective: "Just like a long run or a hard workout, I hated it while doing it, but once the paper was finished I felt like I had really accomplished something." Another cadet claimed that the paper opened up new avenues of outside-the-classroom discussion: "It was extremely challenging, yet also rewarding. I can't remember another paper that I was able to passionately debate with classmates because of a close personal connection to the paper."

When the semester had ended, and all had turned in their final papers, students recognized that they had engaged in a difficult, demanding process, but had emerged stronger for it. One student asserted, "This paper cannot compare to any other research papers that I have had to write. It has been by far the most difficult paper I have ever written, although it is the most rewarding. I also enjoyed writing this paper more than any other paper I have written." Some recognized the pedagogical goals behind the assignment. One student concluded, "I would say that this is one of the most educational papers I've ever written because it involved the class in every aspect of historical analysis." One ROTC cadet declared, "The assignment was as close as an undergraduate student could ever get to understanding the whole historical process beginning with the battle and ending with an account." Another agreed that the assignment "made me think outside the box and helped me better understand history and the process in which it is researched as a whole." Others appreciated the level of excitement they felt while engaging in the process. One wrote, "It was thrilling to actually get the chance to research and produce a research paper in the same way that professional historians do." One student issued a declaration that this assignment was "the highlight of my college education (in as far as engrossing classroom experiences go)." He concluded, "This was a great project; I would suggest this to any and ALL history majors, as a singularly perfect project for allowing the researcher into the process of histor[ical] writing."

Future Uses of the Project

The wargame assignment continues to yield pedagogical benefits beyond the class for which it was initially designed, as it can become an interactive learning tool for future classes as well. I intend to utilize the experience as the centerpiece of a two week Summer Enhancement Workshop that teaches high school students how to be historians. Coupled with field trips to nearby battlefields, the workshop will culminate with the students learning to use the historical method to write a history of the Battle of Durham Park. Similarly, I will utilize previously fought wargames in college undergraduate courses that focus on historical writing. The beauty of conducting the wargame on campus is that future students can interact with the learning material by reading the primary sources while walking the actual fields where the action took place. There, they can try to visualize what occurred, establish chronology, and question their interpretations of the event. Unlike the actual participants who fought the wargame, future classes will have no first-hand knowledge of the wargame, and hence their use of the sources to create a comprehensive history of the battle will not be subtly influenced by their own personal experience at the battle.

Post-graduates can also benefit from the fruits of the wargame. Every year, I donate all the wargame participants' final papers to the permanent archival collection because I intend to utilize the collection as a teaching tool for high school history teacher workshops and graduate level editing courses. Current or future history teachers who take such a workshop can evaluate how well the students researched and wrote their papers. They can edit the papers for quality of the research, organization, content, and writing style and grade the papers. By establishing criteria for what constitutes an excellent, average, or failing paper, teachers can focus on refining their own assumptions about historical writing and analysis. Similarly, students of graduate level editing courses can subject the papers to rigorous evaluation, correcting writing, grammatical, and stylistic mistakes, while focusing on what needs to be done to each paper to make it a more perfect work. Teachers and future editors will have to familiarize themselves with the sources in order to be able to evaluate the students' work effectively, and by extension they will be sharpening their own skills relating to the historical process.

The wargame assignment allows students to participate dynamically in the historical process. Students actively create the historical event and its written sources. They interact with their peers—through discussion and debate—and with the primary sources as they research, organize, and write their final papers. Combining these active and interactive learning processes greatly enhances students' comprehension of how history is created and, more importantly, interpreted. By having to "impose order on the chaos" of the historical sources, they come away with a fuller appreciation of how historians practice their craft. The instructor can utilize the assignment not only to benefit those students who participate in the class, but also to teach the historical process to future prospective history students, teachers, and editors. After turning in a very high quality paper, one student reflected appreciatively on the assignment: "I really felt that the project brought the historical process to life for us." This professor especially values comments like these. I consider any activity that gets students excited about history while simultaneously teaching them the skills necessary to understand the process of history to be an exceedingly worthwhile endeavor.

Notes

^1.� Paul E. Kopperman, Braddock at the Monongahela (Pittsburgh: University of Pittsburgh Press, 1977), 50–92.

^2.� Thomas A. Desjardin, These Honored Dead: How the Story of Gettysburg Shaped American Memory (Cambridge: Da Capo Press, 2003), 133–137.

^3.� I require students to conduct research during the reading room's regular hours a minimum of three separate times, for one hour each, so they can learn the proper procedures for conducting research in a professional Special Collections. After they satisfy their three trips, I make the collection available at the Special Collections Circulation desk outside of normal reading room hours, so that students can conduct research in the evening or on weekends. They are still limited to using the collection on the 4^th floor of the library, in the Special Collections wing, which has longer hours than the reading room.

^4.� The students completed the evaluations and submitted them to me on the day of the final exam. All evaluations are in the author's possession.

Appendix: Sample Photographs

An Appalachian soldier pursues a fleeing Georgia soldier as casualties litter the battlefield. Note that participants are lying on the ground to indicate their "wounded" status.

Action shot of Georgia soldier and Appalachian soldier attacking each other while casualties look on. Note the water balloon narrowly missing the near soldier.

As the battle goes against them, the remaining members of Team Appalachian plot a new strategy.

Teams are allowed to use non-motorized devices to propel water balloons through the air. Here, Team Appalachian uses a slingshot as a form of artillery.

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