Remco

Commitment can be facilitated by a personal experience that comes from personal care of each slice of the topic. An example of this. creating, testing, or working on your own project or your own campaign, which is related to a group that is important to the student eg. country, age group.

Game-example: Planet Nomads

Planet Nomads is a singleplayer sci-fi sandbox game of survival on alien planets through block-style building. You are a lone astronaut scientist crash-landing on a strangely captivating planet. Keeping your wit together and securing your basic survival needs that include food, water and building material is the best start towards figuring out a way out of this messy situation.

Planet Nomads delivers a unique gaming experience by combining building, survival and exploration together to make you feel like a true survivor.
Surviving on an inhabited planet is no easy task, but with careful planning, caution and a healthy amount of curiosity, you can do it. As long as you overcome poisonous plants and curious beasts, avoid being slashed to pieces, frozen to death, eaten alive, starved and generally ended.

Features of the game:

• completely mineable voxel terrain
• physics-ruled block-based building
• actual wheel physics for vehicles, rails, traps and gadgets
• three types of wheels
• hover physics
• multiple biomes based on temperature and humidity
• Improved animal AI to catch you off guard
• climate-based creature diversity
• automated mining machines and production blocks
• mobile bases
• survival mechanics embedded to the game’s core design
• constant evolution based on community feedback.

Students research in small groups on how education is funded in different countries in the world.

Students share findings and choose a country where education is poorly accessed and then research a way to support a project that is trying to increase participation.

(See Inman ao, Holding on to our values, London South Bank Un. 2012)

Language Treasure Hunt. For students to experience a situation where they cannot find their way because they are unable to speak the language, to empathise with those who are refugees in a new country.
Consider the students in your class. Are there any learners that can speak an additional language to the one used for instruction in school? These could include languages that use a different alphabet. Gather these students together and ask for their help.

• Ask this group of students to make some signposts in their additional languages for common places you would find in a local community such as ‘Pharmacy’ or ‘Chemist’, ‘Supermarket’, ‘School’, ‘Police Station’, ‘Train Station’, ‘Library’, ‘Hospital’, ‘Shop’, ‘Doctor’, ‘Bus Stop’ etc. Make sure the signs contain only words.
• Ask the children to position themselves around the room or a larger space holding up their signs. Ask them to only speak in their language for the full duration of the lesson.
• Explain to the students that they will be asked to complete some simple tasks, similar to those that a newly arrived refugee might need to complete.
• Tell the students that they can ask for help from others and that if they have access to the internet they can also use that too. Let them set off on their ‘hunt’.

Group activity: Students read true stories about people in need from different parts of the world. They are then asked to express their emotions and feelings and discuss why they feel like that. Students are asked to reflect on how people can raise their resilience and deal with the problems they are facing.

Students visit an NGO e.g. for unaccompanied children in a refugee camp or a charity institution and meet vulnerable people. Discuss with them and with the people that support them, the conditions of living in a host country, ways they are supported and practical ways that students can support.

As a follow up, students organise an action (collecting clothes, toys or first needs goods, or other actions) to support the group.

One way to develop empathy is to use games, simulations, especially live role-playing games (larp), because they allow you to get to know another viewpoint by taking on a role.

An example of a game designed for a relatively well-known post-apocalyptic world:

Game-example: Hunger Games

1st Hunger Games Larp in Hungary

Hunger Games in Poland

Students research support activities for homeless/poor people in town including hostels and foster homes. Aim to visit some of these and speak with staff and service users.

Discuss findings and how they might provide support e.g. volunteer work in the shelter, buddy work, fundraising etc. Implement and evaluate the project.

Show or handout a copy of a map demonstrating the unequal nature of access to education around the world. Ask students to discuss the following questions:

• What does the data show about education access in their own country and continent?
• How does this compare with other countries and continents in the world?
• What does it show about education levels or access around the world?
• Do students think that there is fair access to education across the world?

Use charts, infographic and statistics that show for contagious diseases in the world, or malnutrition in the world etc.

In groups, students use various sources of information (e.g. ICT), and explain the figures, facts and statistics and present a holistic view of the problem. Examples of prompting questions are: In which countries or regions is the problem big and in which countries is it non-existent? Why?

Which ages are affected? Which factors intensify the problem? What remedial measures are taken? How can countries, groups, people eliminate the risk? What policies and strategies are followed for addressing the problem?

Each group presents and discusses their results to the plenary and jointly develop a plan with suggested strategies addressing the local context for increasing local resilience.

Game-example: Profit-Seed

The Profit Seed game explores the issues surrounding genetically modified organisms (GMO) and the patenting of agricultural seeds. It is also an experiment with a novel game mechanic. A player uses her mouse to control the wind, trying to plant heirloom seeds while preventing GMO seeds from blowing onto a farmer’s plots. If enough GMO seeds land in the field and germinate, the lawyer from an agribusiness corporation comes to sue the farmer and take his land.

Students complete the ‘poverty print’ (or use search words ‘tradecraft blog poverty footprint quiz’), discuss the outcome and set up a ‘personal action plan’ for improvement.

Students read the ‘poverty footprint indicator guide’ for organisations. After reading, students, in small groups, choose three points of interest from the guide and prepare interviews for different levels of the school personnel (managers, teachers, staff, cleaning personnel, restaurant employees, students, post-graduates etc.
After the interviews the results are compared and a final conclusion is written.
The activities can be broadened to a next level by using the guide for nations:
A final discussion is organised in which the guide is used as a ‘quick evaluation instrument’ for nations: take the lowest five nations on the list of poor countries (see ‘participation’) and see if there are clues for the low positions in the poverty footprint guide.
Discuss ways improvement can start…