Hi, I’m Kate, and I’ll be walking through the lesson For the Common Good. This lesson includes two simulation games in which students strategize and consider how individual choices can maximize resources for the whole group.
Students will be able to draw parallels between the games they’re playing and the renewable resources we all depend on, they’ll be able to identify strategies for sustainable resource use, and they’ll be able to analyze how the actions of players in these games can impact or relate to the real world.
This lesson is from our middle school curriculum, but it can absolutely be modified for use in an elementary classroom or a high school classroom, just depending on how you scale the discussion questions. The subjects for this lesson are Earth and Environmental Science, Social Studies, Math, and Family and Consumer Science.
Part 1: Something for Everyone
The first part of this lesson is a game called Something for Everyone. To start, you’re going to gather your students in a circle around a table, and you’re going to have poker chips in the middle of the table. The number of poker chips you have will depend on how many players you have in the game, and in the lesson plan we describe exactly how to calculate that. Today, I’ve got seven friends here to help me, and I have 15 poker chips for this game.
The rules of the game are, first, that there’s absolutely no communication while you play. That includes talking, but it also includes gestures, nudges, meaningful eye contact, any form of verbal or nonverbal communication. The second rule is that the chips on the table belong to everyone, and while the music plays, everyone can take chips out of the center. Once you’ve taken a chip, you cannot put it back in the center. If you get 10 poker chips, you can have a piece of candy. At the end of the round, once the music stops playing, I will double the number of chips left in the center. However, there will never be more than there are on the table right now, which in this case is 15.
[Music plays. Participants clear all of the chips out of the center of the table.]
Does anyone have 10 poker chips? No, I guess nobody gets candy then. How many chips are left in the center? Oh dear, there’s zero chips left, and I can’t double zero, so technically our game would have to be over.
In a classroom setting, you’ll want to play this out a few times with your students and see how they react with all of the rules staying the same. Now we’re going to play the game again, but we are going to change that first rule so students can now communicate before we start the music.
[Music plays. Participants each take one chips from the table.]
Alright, did anybody get 10 chips? No, it looks like each person just has one chip, and there are chips left on the table this time. There are 8 chips left, and so I would double that. However, remember we can’t go over 15, which is our maximum, so I will put 7 new chips on and we would start the next round with 15 chips.
So you’ll want to continue playing with your students, and eventually it would take 10 rounds, if everyone adheres to the strategy, in order for every student to have enough poker chips to receive candy.
To debrief this activity, there are a number of discussion questions that relate this game to the real world. So the chips, you can first ask, were what type of resource? And students will think about it and consider that they are renewable resources. They did replenish themselves each round, but they had to be used wisely.
This activity, especially that first round, illustrates a game theory concept called the tragedy of the commons. What this states is that when you have a shared resource, everyone is going to act in their own short-term self-interest. So there is no advantage for a player to leave poker chips on the table for future rounds, because another player would have immediately taken those poker chips.
But that’s where the tragedy comes in, because everyone is trying to take as much as they can, as quickly as they can, you end up depleting that shared resource, so nobody can use it in the future. And of course, this paradigm can be used in the real world to apply to a number of different situations, especially with natural resources. Instead of taking lots of poker chips, you could think of it as overfishing, as polluting, as rapid deforestation, or over-farming the land. The good news is that communication changed the outcome of the game. So once students were able to strategize, to collaborate, and to hold each other accountable, they found a way to use this resource in a sustainable way over time.
Part 2: A Social Dilemma
Part two of this lesson is another game called a social dilemma. You’re going to give every one of your students a small piece of paper, and tell them the rules of the game. The first rule is that every student must write either the letter C, or the letter D on their piece of paper. If you write a C, I will give everyone else in the class $1 of play money, but I won’t give you anything. If you write a D, then I will give you only $2. There’s absolutely no looking at what anybody else is writing, you’re just making this decision on your own. And at the end, the amount of money you get will be determined not only by what you wrote on your piece of paper, but by what other people wrote on their papers as well.
You can probably guess that the majority of students are going to start out by writing a D on their paper, which means they would get the certain $2. But talk to your students about the possible outcomes of this game. Ask them, if every person in the class wrote a D on their paper, how much money would each person get? The answer is $2 exactly. But, if every person in the class wrote a C on their paper, then how much money would everyone get? Each person in that case would get the number of students in the class minus 1. So that’s a much bigger number than just getting a flat $2. Ask your students if they’d like to change their answers, and see what happens, and calculate out how much money each person would receive at the end of the game.
The discussion questions ask students, again, to relate this back to the real world. So ask them to brainstorm, first, what could the C stand for, and what could the D stand for? In this case, C most likely stands for cooperating, and D stands for defecting. Ask students to think about examples of cooperative or C-type behavior in the real world. And finally, to close out, ask them to consider a real social dilemma in which too few people cooperate. Thinking about what they did in their class today, ask them how we can change, and how we can make sure that more people are collaborating and working together for a better outcome.
For more lessons like this one, go to www.populationeducation.org. Thanks!