Downscaling Simulations and Role-Playing Games with an Element Design Approach

• In Event: Games, Simulations, and Tools in Context

Abstract

Often contrasted with the traditional lecture, active learning typically refers to teaching techniques that require student engagement and participation (Prince 2004). The predominant active learning approach discussed in the political science education literature is simulations, which tend to exhibit a clear bias towards the subfield of International Relations and courses in the United States (Craig 2014; Ishiyama 2013; Kammerer & Higashi, 2021). Despite their prominence in the literature, however, simulations and other active learning techniques appear rather uncommon in teaching (Archer and Miller, 2011). Therefore, a core issue this article aims to address is the gap between writing about active learning and its actual deployment in the classroom.

This discrepancy between publishing and practice points to a critical challenge for political science education: to develop active learning assignments that are feasible to implement and subfield independent. With a specific focus on simulations and role-playing games, this study argues that four transfer barriers hinder the smooth replication of active learning techniques from the literature into the classroom. To overcome these barriers, I introduce the concept of element design, which refers to isolating and incorporating elements from existing active learning techniques into a single assignment. Then, I apply an element design approach to the popular Reacting to the Past role-play series.

The result of this exercise is the Counterfactual Case Study, which is an assignment that blends elements of Reacting to the Past with four other active learning techniques: counterfactual analysis, case studies, small group work, and presentations. In counterfactual case studies, students work in small groups to reconstruct a historical case under hypothetical conditions established by the teacher. To help guide their historical reconstruction, groups are assigned roles that represent competing factions within each case. For an international Master’s course on Media and Political Engagement, 40 students were tasked with arguing for how 4 major events would play out with the inclusion of social media: the Protestant Reformation, the American Revolution, the Rise of Fascism, and the Fall of the Berlin Wall. Students defined what types of social media technologies were available, how and by whom they were used, and built a case study around how the inclusion of social media would affect political engagement during their historical event as well as the outcome of the event itself.

This study’s main focus concerns pedagogical development and aims to illustrate how elements from established pedagogies can be extracted and adapted to create new assignments. The modularity fostered by element design, I argue, increases the customizability of active learning techniques to fit a teacher’s specific needs in terms of course content, learning objectives, and crucially, available resources. In supporting this argument, the study details the design, implementation, a student-feedback of the counterfactual case study in a political communication context.

Empirically, the primary purpose of the study is to identify the merits, limits, and areas for improvement in deploying an open-ended, ungraded, and low-resource active learning technique relative to more established simulation and role-play methods. Although learning was not explicitly quantified, open-ended student evaluations provide support for the study’s motivating hypothesis that borrowing elements from high resource pedagogies like Reacting to the Past can still promote student engagement through less resource-intensive assignments. Moreover, the data points to a lower bound in attempting to scale down established pedagogies too far, particularly with respect to the importance of allocating sufficient class time for debriefing.

Moving beyond ‘show and tell,’ the present study offers three contributions. First, it categorizes existing barriers to more widespread adoption of simulations and role-plays in political education. Second, it offers a heuristic framework to approach assignment customization and development through element design. Third, the study offers a new assignment for political communication, which is heavily underrepresented in the political science education literature.

Author

• Michael Bossetta, Lund University, Sweden