On November 21st, 2023, Léa Lévy and Jonas Kreutzer shared their experiences with using serious games in teaching at the Faculty of Engineering at Lund University in our seminar on “Serious games in teaching sustainability”. They use the “Climate Fresk” and “Biodiversity Collage” serious games, in which small groups of participants receive cards that depict (and sometimes also explain) concepts related to either climate change or biodiversity loss. Participants arrange cards in such a way that they can connect the cards by telling coherent, usually non-linear, stories about mechanisms, causes and consequences. Both card decks are based on reports that summarise the state of current knowledge, the IPCC and the IPBES, respectively. So by arranging the cards, participants cover all main aspects of those reports.
Léa and Jonas use these and similar games for many different purposes, for example
- to let students explore and discover the content of the reports that the games are based on
- to gain general knowledge about the topics of the games
- to use as advance organiser for the rest of the course or even study program, when different aspects will be covered and can be pointed to in the bigger picture
- to raise interest in specific aspects
- to generate discussion
- to create community among students who get to know each other in a new and different setting
Léa and Jonas shared their experiences in the seminar and, by facilitating parts of the game, let seminar participants also gain first-hand experiences of what it feels like to play such a serious game. They also talked us through the other, very important phases of playing such a game: The debriefing phase, where participants share their emotions, and the getting-into-action phase, where participants brainstorm what they want to learn in order to deal with the challenges they have just been confronted with, or what they can do in different settings.
We also talked about the theoretical background of what makes these games a good tool in teaching (for example by drawing on the head-hands-heart framework discussed here), but mostly participants wanted to know and discuss how to do something similar in their own teaching. The most mentioned feedback after this seminar was “inspiring!”, and “we need more time to talk!”. Thank you, Léa and Jonas, for the inspiration, and yes, we are planning a follow-up meeting!
P.S.: A longer summary (written right after the event with still a lot of adrenaline and no effort to proof-read) is available on Mirjam’s personal blog: https://mirjamglessmer.com/2023/11/21/our-seminar-today-serious-games-in-teaching-for-sustainability/
