Blog Post 6

 Blog 6:

As a social studies teacher, two games that immediately came to mind were Oregon Trail and Monopoly. Being that Oregon Trail was specifically developed to simulate historical events during westward expansion for students, it seems very fitting for this topic in New Media and New Literacy. I have not used Oregon Trail as a resource extensively within my classes but I am certainly considering finding more of a place for it within my classroom. In my first two years of teaching, I had the pleasure of teaching economics classes for a portion of my day and one of my favorite activities that I did was a modified version of the game monopoly to teach students how monopolies work through their actions within the game. 

In my small, five or fewer student, economics classes in the past I would introduce the topic of capitalism and its impact within our national economy and within the world economy. As we would get a few days into this unit of study, we would delve into the topic of robber barons and their creation of monopolies within our capitalistic economy. Once this foundational information was covered, I would introduce my students to my abbreviated/modified version of monopoly. I created this modified version of monopoly to make the spaces on the board more relevant to modern business sectors and students interests. My version was abbreviated because the format of regular monopoly can result in games taking upwards of three hours and I wanted my version to take one to two class periods. In the game task directions for students, they were told that they were to act as robber barons within this game with the goal of increasing their wealth and power by controlling more of the valuable assets on the game board. During game play, students had to act in ways that they were conditioned to view as bad sportsmanship throughout their entire lives. Some students were uncomfortable with making moves within the game that yielded negative outcomes for their peers/friends in class. There were instances where students negotiated the purchase of a property from a peer that was struggling in the game, and those students who held the power in that dynamic often wanted to show mercy on their peers to offer a more fair purchase price rather than take advantage of a desperate player to build personal wealth and power. I often gave reminders and prompted students to remember the motivations of robber barons and how they were able to build their wealth and power. 

At the conclusion of this game simulation, students were tasked with reflecting on the activity. Students often noted that when players controlled an entire industry, landing on their space could cripple you and lead to you losing the game. Many students thought it was unfair that when an individual had control over an entire industry they could raise the price other players had to pay periodically throughout the remainder of the game. Through one of the prompts regarding “fairness” in the student reflection, a couple students noted that there should be rules to prevent players from completely taking control of an industry because when that happened, it leads to unfair outcomes and challenges for other players. At the very start of the game simulation, students knew that they would be tasked with reflecting on their experience within this monopoly game, but they did not realize that their experiences and reflection assessing those experiences from the game would segway us into the development of economic regulations.    

In my monopoly activity, some students required differentiated assistance during their turn, in which I would help them think out loud about what choices could lead to the most personal gains for them as a player. This was expected as my classes are made up of special education students. In the way I set up this multi-day activity, there was scaffolding in that the students did some pre-learning about the growth of capitalism in the gilded age and robber barons. If I was to teach economics again I would certainly use this activity in the sequence of teaching capitalism and economic regulation. For larger classes, I would have to create more of my game boards to do multiple groups playing separate games in the room. I think this would add to the interactive nature of this game experience because there would be distinctly different events taking place in the games of the different groups. The different experiences could be shared in a jigsaw style debrief where students could think comparatively about the events of their game and those of the other group. 

In this monopoly game simulation, students would be assessed through their ability to interpret the actions that took during the game through the lens of social literacy and civic/ethical literacy. Socially, students would be evaluating how players interacted with each other and what dynamics led to certain students succeeding and certain students losing. Through the lens of civic and ethical literacy, students would have to evaluate how players’ actions impacted others in terms of fairness and how players’ actions impacted the game overall, representing the individual impact on the system as a whole.