brainstorm series I: designing a game or simulation for 400+ IR undergrad students

Time to Brainstorm

One of my former professors is wondering how to get his students more engaged in a course he teaches.  During a recent trip to Rwanda, we started discussing simulations I use in our course at the World Bank and Rex’s mega-simulation at Mc Gill and I suggested that may be some kind of game or simulation could get his students more involved.

Another benefit of a simulation might be that he could identify those students that are likely to be most engaged – in fact, a very difficult simulation early in the course might help to select out some of the more laxadaisical freeriders early on.

In our discussion we agreed that a game or simulation for 400 students is a pretty tall order.  Still, I thought it might make an interesting thought experiment/challenge to put up here and throw around some ideas from our smart readership.

So, here is the challenge:  any ideas for some kind of game or simulation that you could get 400 people playing in a course on economic development, globalization and international relations?  What are the challenges to consider?  Any suggestions for getting students engaged with a simulation or suggestions for scoring?  Anything you do in the class room that works particularly well (or should be avoided)?  Any game ideas that you’ve been contemplating  (“I’ve always thought it would be interesting to…”) but just haven’t had the time to execute? 

This will be a moderated discussion in a series of posts, I will take some of the suggestions from comments and discuss them again in a future post and we can continue to carry forward the conversation.  For now we’ll refer to the teacher as Professor X and see if he wants to join the discussion in the future. 

And remember, this is brainstorming, so keep the suggestions coming!