An idea for gamifying lessons on cognitive biases in Digital Citizenship classes

Wellbeing Children & teens
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Given the expandable list of cognitive biases here and on wikipedia (picture), I as Digital Citizenship teacher had an idea to actively involve my 13-18 years old students and I’m experimenting it at school during this week and the next one.

Game: mind of cards

Phase 1

  • each one has to choose one (or more) cognitive bias in the picture
  • they have to check the definition of the bias in the wikipedia list
  • they have to think about two use cases of the bias:
    – positive case: a case in which applying the bias results in a positive effect for the applying person
    – negative case: a case in which applying the bias results in a negative effect for the applying person, and positive for someone else (physical person, company, social media, etc.) who exploited the bias to get some profit (money, fame, approval, …)
  • once they have the two cases for each chosen bias, they have to draw three paper cards: one with the name and description of the bias, one with the negative use case, one with the positive use case.

Phase 2

This would be the game itself (I hope it would be entertaining, at least a little bit).

  • each students picks up the same number of cards from each of the three sets of cards (biases, positive cases, negative cases) until there are no more cards on the table

In turn:

  • a student throws on the table a bias card
  • the others have to reply with the relative positive and negative case, if they have it among their cards
    – if the 2th and 3th cards thrown are correct relatively to the thrown bias, they stay on the table, otherwise who threw them has to pick them up again
  • the first student who remains with no cards in their hands wins

I’m still in Phase 1 at school, so maybe I’ll have to revise some rules of the game in Phase 2…

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Cool!! This is a great, great idea @micheleminno!

This whole concept is wonderful for one or more community projects, to involve pupils / children with the community, and to have them involved in community-building in meaningful way, where they learn things in fun ways that have practical real-life application.

PS. Instead of calling it simply a game, I think this is a great example of Gamification (the link is to a great Coursera course that starts today), and can be very powerful teaching tool.

We can create a Gamification campaign under Tech Wise theme, and have game deliverables.

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An update about this: my students created the cards, I refined and completed them and then they played. The game is enough self-explanatory and rewarding to give some fun, along with more knowledge and awareness about biases and good/bad applications of them.
I created an issue on github to make this game something more than a gamification useful in Digital Citizenship classes.

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This idea is fantastic, and I love :heart: it. Sure we can make a truly nice campaign out of it.

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The information is really helpful.

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The gamification is idea is nice and being an expert I have applied it with my students at EduHelpHub however the most important thing that needs to keep in mind is that the children needs to concentrate on studies and use the gaming aspect for the positive development.

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