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History and Geography Department: Bringing the Waterloo Campaign to Life

November 4, 2026

On Nov 2 and 3, Mr. David O’Leary led grade 11 IB History students to explore Napoleon’s 1815 campaign through strategic gameplay and a source-based battlefield investigation across two lessons. Using the Napoleon Returns 1815 board game, they considered how movement, timing and cooperation shaped commanders’ decisions. Perhaps the best sign of their engagement was that students chose to continue playing the campaign game at lunchtime.




Moving from the wider campaign to the Battle of Waterloo itself, students worked in pairs at six classroom stations featuring eyewitness accounts, historians’ interpretations, maps, battlefield photographs and paintings. They annotated a battlefield map with key events, compared perspectives and weighed competing explanations for Napoleon’s defeat.




The investigation developed key skills in source analysis, causation and evidence-based judgement. Through collaborative discussion, students justified their conclusions, challenged one another’s interpretations and reconsidered their initial assumptions.


To conclude the week, students took a virtual tour of the battlefield as it looks today before examining selected scenes from Waterloo (1970). They considered how the landscape, monuments and cinematic choices shape our understanding of the battle, testing the film’s portrayal against the evidence they had studied. The Duke of Wellington once observed that “the history of a battle is not unlike the history of a ball.” Students explored that challenge for themselves, piecing together different perspectives to explain not just what happened at Waterloo, but why.


(Written by: David O’Leary   Pictures by: David O’Leary    Supervised by Yunuo Li   Reviewed by Qian Zuo）