“A certain enemy robbed me of my life”: Medieval Riddles, Digital Transformations, and Pandemic Pedagogy

This essay examines a Fall 2020 assignment for a second-year undergraduate “Introduction to Digital Humanities” course as a case study of digital experiential learning during the Covid-19 pandemic. The essay is a collaboration between the course instructor (Bolintineanu) and teaching assistant (Henderson), with our student game creators (Alves, Carino, Cho, Du). We situate the assignment, which invites students to transform a medieval riddle into a Twine game, within Digital Humanities (DH) Inquiry-Based Learning (IBL), at the crossroads of archive-centred learning and critical making; and we examine contributions by four student game creators within the pedagogical poetics of the early medieval riddle tradition.