Showcases
1. "Practicing EDI in a classroom by educators"
This is a showcase where game-based learning has been used for ice-breaker, discussion promotion, team working and brainstorming to discuss EDI issues in a class of educators. All these educators are course directors as LSBU and suggested to use this for induction for students, as well as a training route for educators.
This showcase was facilitated by the team of Hellenic Open University during the 1st TEGA Learning Activity in Athens, on June 2022.
It is a demonstration of the LEGO® Serious Play (LSP) technique that fosters communication and enhances the dynamics of a team in solving problems of the team or the people involved.
LSP releases imagination, inspiration and intuition as it involves human aspects such as emotion, logic and instinct and can create learning by unlocking new knowledge and breaking habitual thinking. An LSP workshop basically consists of the following steps:
- The facilitator, in our case Dr. Vyron Damasiotis, makes clear the building time and asks participants to build a model with their LEGO® bricks that expresses their thoughts on a given building challenge.
- Participants "think with their hands" and build their response to the given challenge. It is a concrete, three-dimensional model of their reflections and ideas. While building their models, participants assign meaning to them by means of metaphors.
- One at a time, each participant shares the story that they have assigned to their own model. The sharing is in itself a reflection process: participants explore their own expressions more closely. This reflection process ensures that every participant in the workshop is and remains involved in realising a solution. Nobody is left out while all knowledge is visible on the table.
3. Using a board game to understand the sustainable design of modern cities
This showcase was recorded by the team of Hellenic Open University during the 2nd TEGA Learning Activity in Lisbon, on October 2022.
The goal of the game is to build a city in a way that the distribution of the resources (food, water, other goods and nature/green spaces) are distributed sustainably throughout the city's territory.
The players work as a team and place the territory units (hexagons) on the table to create the territory of the city. Then they place the building blocks of the city (white cubes) on the hexagons. They must decide on which hexagons they should place the tiles of the resources (Green=nature / Blue=water /Yellow=food / Black=other goods). Finally they use the coloured connection sticks to establish the necessary connections between the urban hexagons and the resources. The ultimate goal is to place the buildings and the resources in such a strategic way so that all building blocks have access to natural environment, water, food, goods.
Apart from gaining consciousness for urban sustainability, the players enhance their skills in working collaboratively, creatively thinking, communication and negotiation, working out the best solution to a shared problem.
Acknowledgement: This prototype board game is designed by the game designer, Dr. Micael Sousa, Researcher in spatial planning at University of Coimbra/CITTA, Department of Civil Engineering.
4. Agile Project Management game
This showcase is a game designed by a group of Organisation Development Staff and Academics around the topic of agile project management. The exercise aims to teach different aspects of lean principle and is given the negative and positive points for different teams suggestions. There will be 3 groups of 5, competing and a facilitator who grants the points.
5. Agile Penny Game
The Agile Penny Game provides a fun and engaging way to teach agile principles and practices to teams. It can help teams understand the importance of communication, collaboration, and continuous improvement in achieving their goals. By experiencing the challenges and constraints of the game, teams can better understand the value of agile methodology and apply it to real-world projects.
The Agile Penny Game was inspired by the Lean Manufacturing Game, a simulation game used to teach the principles of lean manufacturing. The Lean Manufacturing Game was developed by John Bicheno, a professor at the University of Buckingham in the UK.
The creator of the Agile Penny Game, Mishkin Berteig, adapted the Lean Manufacturing Game to create a game that teaches the principles of agile methodology. Berteig is an agile coach and trainer who has worked with numerous teams and organizations to implement agile practices.
6. Public Goods Game – group decision making game with tokens
The public goods game is a staple of game theory strongly linked to the prisoner’s dilemma. It considers a similar game structure where a group of players must decide how to contribute to a public pot versus a private pot.
The goal on the processes is for students to learn how a behavioural economic theory of their choice can be understood and investigated. They will do this by designing and running their own experiment based around this behavioural economic theory and they analysis this in a relevant statistical tool.
This is a common game in the experimental economic literature used to consider the impact of attempting to provide public goods. The wider inspiration to use it in this context as an option for students to design experiments is that it exists in a range of contexts which allow them to find resources to support what they are doing as they prepare for the experiment.
7. Prospect Theory Game – betting with sweets to observe loss aversion / endowment effect
The goal of the game is to understand how people effected by loss, and endowment. Do people act differently when outcomes are presented as losses and gains instead of simply payoffs? Do people care more about something when they pick it rather than when they are yet to get it?
Prospect theory is a general concept that suggests that the pre-existing literature on expected utility proposed by Von Neumann and Morgenstern. It argues that people do not make risk-based decisions from an abstract point but rather consider things from their initial starting point as a future prospect.
To test this, students set up a simple game of betting. These bets are against on other player or group of players. Victory is framed either as an all or nothing bet where at the end of the game the person with the highest amount will win everything or as a staggered victory where multiple players win something, or you keep your winnings. This creates different winning conditions and therefore incentives to bet on random outcomes. They can also start with no sweets so all future bets are framed as winning or losing and having a negative amount while the other case has endowment of 5 sweets so should make people more reticent to lose what they have already (endowment effect) but also even with a lose they still have something so could be argued to be less of a loss. Not a perfect preference / utility process but open to other alternatives using a similar system.