AIC

I am currently in a class that requires me to have multiple personalities. Fortunately for my family it’s not a United States of Tara situation, but it has made for some pretty great conversations.  My favorite at-home moment being the time I responded to my husband, “Give me a minute, I’m in the middle of an email to Hezbollah!” His response was to calmly walk to my home office and say, “What the [bleep]????” I laughed uncontrollably and explained.

I thought it would be fun to talk about a tech-reliant class on the blog I keep for my EdTech class. This split-personality class is actually a simulation of the Arab-Israeli conflict that exists 100% online and a really great experience for both the high school students, their teachers, and the game moderators. The split-personality characterization comes form the fact that each “game” has National Security Advisors who work with a certain number of teams, and a Game Mentor who oversees the entire game (we have 4 games running at once in our class) and we play both the Game Mentor and the NSAs. Shhhhh… the high school students don’t know this yet!!

I’d like to give you an overview of the simulation/game, from my perspective. The game consists of participants and moderators (for lack of better terms). The high school students are the participants, and we, the grad students, are the moderators along with our Professor and the classroom teachers. The participants are each assigned a real life human being who is somehow politically connected to the Middle East conflict. The participants must learn about that person and their political affiliations so they can act as them during the simulation. For example, one of my groups (that I act as the NSA for) is the Palestinian Hamas, which consists of three players: Ismail Haniya, Mahmoud Zahhar, and Kahled Meshaal; each person is being taken on by a high school student. In addition to the students not knowing that I sometimes play Game Mentor, they don’t (initially anyway) know that I am the NSA to nine other countries/governments/political groups. In fact, I am advising groups in conflict with each other (Hamas, Fatah, and Israel are all part of my “family” of players!). I’ll be honest; it is not always easy to keep track of it all. The term started with each group working together to research their country/group and to develop about three strategic goals that they think best represent their group. An example of a strategic goal comes from Iran:

“We want to drive a wedge between Israel and the U.S. through the public relations campaign aimed at the intelligentsia of the West before they form a united front against us and try take away our nuclear program.”

This is what the Strategic Goals page looks like.  These are Jordan's approved goals.

Pretty cool, eh? I’m not sure what grade they are, but both examples show their ability to analyze and apply knowledge, which I think is good stuff! Once their goals are approved the game begins. Participants develop Action Forms if their group wants some sort of event to occur; but they don’t get to choose which of the four options they develop actually play out – the Game Mentor does! There is always a “do nothing” option which is sometimes more fun to play than taking action. There are also required Weekly Reports, and Press Releases. All of which must be reviewed, commented on, and approved by the NSAs. In other words, there is a LOT of work involved but I think the experiences these kids are having are worth my time and effort.

My game partner is really wonderful and we’ve become better friends because of this experience together. She has really connected with the students in a way that has enriched the entire experience and I feel so fortunate to be her game partner! She has also kept us organized which is really important; we share a couple of google docs where we keep notes and parse out what needs to get done. Since we are sharing the Game Mentor duties we try to keep things even but between us, she’s doing more work. I mentioned that she is connecting with the students but what I didn’t mention is that they are sending her 3 page documents to review/edit on a somewhat regular basis!! I feel fortunate that I’m not getting those but I’m also a bit jealous that she’s developed this relationship with her students.

What I’ve really enjoyed about this class is 1) the Professor (and the reason I took the class in the first place), 2) the opportunity to see how an online simulation actually works, and 3) exposure to issues that I thought I knew something about, but didn’t. I would also add that it gives me some practice with virtual education, something teachers really need to know about since so many schools have online components.

I would highly recommend this class to anyone interested in how online simulations work and/or those interested in the Middle East. Do NOT consider this class because it seems like it will not be too much work – it is a lot of work but I think it has been a really wonderful experience!

Ask me about The Lemon Tree and how the Professor incorporated this in our class…