Educators
Here we provide instructions on how to use a series of experimental games in class. We use experiments in our teaching to have students be exposed to various social dilemmas. Those experimental games might be used in courses at universities, but also at high schools, or professional training. All the experimental games are paper and pencil games and will be easy to implement in class rooms without any technical constraints.
GAMES FOR EDUCATORS
Public Good Game for Educators
In this game students invest in a public fund such as maintenance of an irrigation systems or eradicating invasive weeds in a forest.
Groundwater Game for Educators
In this game students make decisions about which crop to plant where crops require different amounts of water.
Fishery Game for Educators
In this game students have to decide where to fish and how much to fish.
Forest Game for Educators
In this game students harvest from a renewable resource representing trees in a forest.
Irrigation Game for Educators
In this game students have to make decisions to invest in the irrigation system maintenance and to extract water for irrigating their individual plots.
Channel Irrigation Game for Educators
This game can be played in virtual meeting rooms. Players need to take water use decisions in the face of water scarcity. They can choose to grow water-efficient or water consumptive crops while water is only sufficient for every player to grow the water-efficient crop.
Some practical tips to get prepared for using games as an educational tool:
- Practice the protocol a number of times with a few volunteers. You need to get used to the logistics of the instructions, paperwork and calculating the earnings. If this is a small class you can use this as a practice.
- It is up to you how you provide rewards. You can use extra credit, sweets, or just imaginable rewards.
It will be difficult to keep the students quite. They will get surprised and will express their surprise. This is OK. This is not a controlled experiment so you need to be somewhat flexible. - After a few rounds in the same condition, you may observe the students starting to pay less attention. This might be the moment to a communication or variability.
- Think about the learning objectives for the games. You may discuss how sustainable the outcomes are, or how they think real farmers or fishers may make decisions (and show the results from the research).
- Let us know your how it went so we can share your experience here. You can do this by sending an email to marco.janssen@asu.edu.
- Download this tips as PDF file