Discussions

Your Name and Title:

Peter Stidwill, Executive Producer

School or Organization Name:

Learning Games Network

Area of the World from Which You Will Present:

Boston, MA, USA

Language in Which You Will Present:

English

Target Audience(s):

Teachers (of students aged 8 and up)

Short Session Description (one line):

QUANDARY: Building creativity, empathy and ethical decision-making through play

Full Session Description (as long as you would like):

The Learning Games Network's QUANDARY is a free, multi-award winning game that engages your students in ethical and critical thinking. In this session, you'll see the game in action and explore how players are encouraged to understand, analyze and resolve difficult ethical situations that face a community. You'll also discover the newly launched Character Creator - a unique tool and Contest that connects together students, and their own character creations, from around the world. The prize? A chance to join the design team to build a fourth all-new episode of the game!

The game's scenarios challenge players on a range of societal, cultural and environmental issues, and forms a brilliant spring-board for rich discussion. The setting for the game, Planet Braxos, including its inhabitants and challenges, offers a microcosm of Earth and its very real-world problems. What happens when a diverse set of people need to work together to overcome problems that require teamwork, creativity and compromise in order to solve, an where the player can see the outcome of their choices? The game encourages perspective-taking and systems thinking in order to equip citizens to make better decisions and act on more informed viewpoints.

We'll share practical tips from teachers on seeding and facilitating those discussions, along with advice and ideas for classroom set-up and gameplay - information that is applicable to many game-based learning scenarios.

Come and explore the exciting but challenging world of space colonization on the Planet Braxos - and discover how QUANDARY will help your students recognize ethical issues and deal with challenging situations in their own lives.

Websites / URLs Associated with Your Session:

www.quandarygame.org