BUTLER TWP — Some students may dread English class in school, but others jumped at the opportunity to spend a week at Butler County Community College’s Kids on Campus program learning about one of their favorite series, “The Hunger Games.”

The weeklong course is one of the offerings at Kids on Campus, a summer enrichment program for students in kindergarten through 12th grade.

“The Hunger Games” course, taught from July 18 to 21 by Butler Intermediate High School teacher Tracy Travaglio, focused on showing students entering fifth to eighth grades where the series author Suzanne Collins found her inspiration.

“The Hunger Games” trilogy had its first book of the same title published in 2008, with a movie series that started in 2012.

The story focuses on the dystopian society of Panem, which features the wealthy Capitol with another 12 districts that suffer in relative poverty.

Each year, the Capitol hosts a mandatory death match that features 24 children, one boy and one girl selected from each district.

The death match allows for only one winner, and the event is televised across the districts as both a form of entertainment and punishment for a rebellion that happened against the Capitol in previous years.

Travaglio said the class was originally created by Mitchell Shaw, an English teacher in alternative education at Butler School District’s Center Avenue Community School.

Travaglio took on teaching the class this year, but she said, since she teaches the series in her own English classes, she was comfortable with the material, focusing on the varied sources of inspiration for Collins.

“This class is actually more about what inspired Suzanne Collins to write ‘The Hunger Games,’” Travaglio said. “She did an interview when the first book came out where she talked about the idea.”

Bringing together Greek mythology, Roman culture and modern-day depictions of violence, Collins was inspired to create the dystopian trilogy, Travaglio said.

One of the inspirations for the novel was the Greek myth of Theseus and the Minotaur, said 12-year-old Jordan Morehouse, a soon-to-be seventh-grader in Butler.

Learning about how the myth inspired the story was her favorite part of the class, she said.

In the myth, King Minos of Crete built a maze that included a half-man, half-bull creature called the Minotaur.

Each year, the king would require seven men and seven women from the nearby city of Athens to be sacrificed to the labyrinth as food for the beast.

One year, Theseus, the son of the king of Athens, volunteered himself to be one of the seven men, swearing to kill the Minotaur and end the sacrifices.

This myth is mirrored in “The Hunger Games” since each district must send its sacrifices, who likely will not return from the games.

“They either have to kill or fight until they die,” Jordan said.

The games serve as punishment for the rebelling districts, responding to a ruthless ruler, President Snow in the Capitol. Jordan said she learned about how that punishment is similar to that King Minos demanded from the nearby city.

And the Hunger Games in the book are an event that is used for entertainment, much like the way gladiators provided entertainment in Ancient Rome, according to David Trent, 12, of Gibsonia.

The Colosseum, an amphitheater in Rome, Italy, was used to host fights to the death, but the gladiators ranged from those who volunteered to criminals and slaves who were being punished, Travaglio said.

In the books, some of the children in the games end up volunteering, either to win the prestige of being the sole survivor or to save a loved one from having to fight.

But those who chosen are essentially being punished, like the sacrifices to King Minos’ Minotaur and the criminals who had to fight to the death.

“Both the Roman Colosseum and the Hunger Games were used as punishment,” David said.

What the Roman gladiators did not have was television, a tool used in the fictional Capitol to broadcast the Hunger Games and manipulate the citizens’ concept of reality, Travaglio said.

“(Collins) also said she was watching Iraq war coverage, and she just started to think about how desensitized, especially kids growing up, are to seeing people kill each other. She started to think about that in combination with all of the things that she really loved as child, the Theseus myth and Ancient Rome. It just kind of blossomed into this idea for her.”

David said “The Hunger Games” class taught him that the Vietnam War was the first war being televised in American history, similar to how the Capitol televises the games, both as entertainment and as a message.

This was the first time the average civilian would be exposed to such violence and war, Travaglio said.

She also explained that using television during war time can be a form of propaganda, reinforcing certain ideas to the general public and “manipulat(ing) society.”

In a similar way, the Capitol in the book was able to manipulate the images of the killings in the games to direct the audience reaction, Travaglio said.

“Messages are always manipulated somehow,” she said. “The Capitol manipulates everything, from what happens in the (game) arena to what they show, they always cut out certain things they don’t want people to see. They always try to turn things ...”

With applicable modern-day lessons from “The Hunger Games,” what does Travaglio hope the students got out of their weeklong experience?

“As long as I can open their eyes to not just taking what the media is giving them at face value, then I feel like I’ve accomplished something,” she said. “As long as they can look a little deeper and see who is putting the message out and why they’re putting the message out and what their motives are.”

Other than teaching the students how to be analytical consumers, Travaglio wants the students to leave with “a fresh view of society,” she said.

“If you can come out of one of my classes and have a different perspective, if you can remove yourself from yourself and see things from another person’s point of view or perspective, then I think it’s a successful class.”