PAXsims

Conflict simulation, peacebuilding, and development

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

5 Comments Posted by on 15/06/2009
Time to Brainstorm
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!

simulation and gaming ideas

5 responses to “brainstorm series I: designing a game or simulation for 400+ IR undergrad students”

  1. Gary Milante 25/06/2009 at 5:10 pm

    I like nationstates – it is a fascinating experimental space for playing around with international relations and political systems.

    Please keep the suggestions coming, I’ve started a new thread with some responses.

  2. Michael Bean 21/06/2009 at 6:15 am

    You might consider Nation States. I’m not sure how well it would parallel lecture material but it might make for interesting fodder for conversation. See: ttp://www.nationstates.net

  3. Gary Milante 17/06/2009 at 3:05 pm

    Great suggestions, I’ll leave the floor open for another day or two for other inputs and then collect some of this into a new post.

  4. Lukas Neville 17/06/2009 at 12:45 am

    Doing multiple identical simulations is useful for compare and contrast – and allows you to change one variable. If you have 40 teams, and provide one meaningful twist in the instructions, you can demonstrate in a powerful way how that influences the outcome of the situation.

    For instance, if you wanted to demonstrate the effect of strategic coordination, you could have variants with no lead actors, a partial ‘lead state’ actor, and an impartial IO lead actor. You could then show how this changes the rate of impasse, how it shapes priority-setting among the parties, etc.

  5. Rex Brynen 16/06/2009 at 9:11 pm

    I’ll be offline for much of the next two weeks, so I’ll add some quick thoughts while I’m able to do so.

    First, I think there’s a strategic decision to be made as to whether one wants to simulate a broad system (for example, WTO negotiations) or focus on a particular scenario/theme/issue (for example, the various stakeholders in a major investment or aid initiative). Both approaches have strengths and weaknesses.

    Second, how much class time does one want to devote to this, and over what period of time? Is it a simulation one would run in a class or two, or periodically over the year? Will it be done in class time (and largely face-to-face), or outside of it (and perhaps largely electronically).

    Third, does the class all participate in the same scenario, or are multiple runs of the simulation held simultaneously?

    Fourth, how does one keep a simulation of 400 manageable? I cap my own peacebuilding course at 100 students for reasons of my own sanity! How many TAs do you have to help out?

    Reflecting on all that, here are some initial thoughts on mechanics—minus the actual scenario.

    1) Divide the students into teams of 5-10. Since that still leaves you with 40+ teams, I suggest running 4 or more simultaneous simulations at the same time (which, as Gary can attest from his multiple Carena runs, provides a nice opportunity to do compare-and-contrast in the post-sim debrief).

    2) Have them all meet outside class time, and draw up position papers/negotiation and PR strategies/whatever. Two weeks later, devote one class period to an initial round of negotiations/interaction (you may need extra space!). Give them another week or two to meet, and revise their positions. Devote a second class to negotiations/interaction. Finally, have each student draw up a short individual assessment/debrief/whatever, due a week or so later.

    That all presumes that you want a simulation that engages the entire class. A very different approach is to do a game involving a smaller group, which the entire class then watches. I do one in my introductory development class, that is patterned after a game show (complete with sound effects, patter, lighting, and so forth). It involves a “village” of 5 students/contestants (three small farmers, one medium farmer, and a village artisan) all dealing with the effects of incorporation into the global economy (notably the shift from subsistence to cash crop agriculture, but also colonial rule and independence, demographic change, gender relations, urbanization, and the political effects of all this).

    It is all rather Pythonesque at times, but it gets the point across.

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