Help for teachers
Brief description of game
This is a decision-making game that shows students how various active citizenship strategies can be used to achieve change in a democratic society.
Students are presented with a problem, they decide on their preferred solution from a range of options, and then choose which strategies they will use to influence the decision-makers. In developing and promoting their solution they need to convince the decision makers (the local council) that their plan has economic, social, environmental and community benefit, is practical and sustainable, and is supported by the local community.
Focus on strategies
The key element in the game is the selection and implementation of the most appropriate active citizenship strategies to gain community support and convince the decision makers. Students choose from a suite of possibilities—such as petitions, letters to the editor of the local newspaper, holding meetings, creating posters, using social media, and more. Their chosen strategies must help them establish community support for their proposal. This will include publicising and communicating their ideas, defending them against alternative proposals, persuading people, and enlisting effective support. In the end their overall aim is to show the decision-makers that they have gone through a process that shows that their proposal is practical and has community support.
But the road is not always straight! At various times students will meet hostility or opposition to their proposal, and part of the challenge is to develop further strategies that can overcome these obstacles.
Curriculum alignment
This Passport to Democracy interactive game has been developed as a resource for the Victorian Curriculum and Australian Curriculum: Civics and Citizenship and the Victorian Certificate of Applied Learning (VCAL).
It can be used for:
- Years 5 and 6 Civics and Citizenship: concepts of how people experience democracy and participate in their community
- Years 8 and 10 Civics and Citizenship: concepts of how people can participate in a democracy, and how people can contribute to creating a resilient democracy and a cohesive society
- Senior VCAL, Personal Development Skills, Unit 2, Learning Outcome 3, learning activity for element 3.2: Identify internal and external factors that may impact on desired outcome/s, and plan for possible contingencies.
The resource also engages students in the development and exercise of these Civics and Citizenship skills:
- questioning and research
- analysis and synthesis
- collaborative problem-solving and decision-making
- communication
- interpretation.
Active citizenship learning
While this is a game based on an entirely fictional situation, it does accurately reflect the stages, processes and skills needed for students to be effective agents of change. Students are not told that these are the stages, processes and skills they need, but rather they discover them and implement them naturally as they work through the situations and the various options available.
This is the essence of effective inquiry and hands-on learning—learning by doing.
In the classroom
The resource can be used as a whole class activity, with students working through the resource as individuals or small collaborative groups.
The follow-up reflection activity (students can print this from the ‘Reflection’ screen) provides an excellent basis for class discussion. Topics include: strengths and limitations of possible strategies involved in influencing decision-makers in a democratic society, as well as understanding the sequence of stages needed to become an effective agent of change.
Assessment
The interactive can be used as an assessment task or as a supplementary resource out of class, either as an individual or small group collaborative activity.
Formative feedback
There is an in-built evaluative element for each possible strategy and the way students choose to pursue them. This means that students get realistic feed-back on which to base their reflections.
Learning by experience
There is a great flexibility through the variety of strategies that can be chosen in combination at the Activate screen. This means students can re-play the game many times, exploring different strategies and getting different results, depending on the choices they make about each strategy.