Games as Models

I just got back from the National Science Teachers Association (NSTA) annual conference in Nashville TN.  The NSTA conference is huge and there are many, many good choices of sessions to attend. This is the largest gathering of science teachers in the US, and probably the world, with over 10,000 attendees.  This year I decided to go with a particular objective to focus on since there is no way to glean everything of value at a conference of this size.  I chose some sessions in advance and then left room in my schedule for interesting opportunities.   

Since I’ve been thinking more about the new Next Generation Science Standards (NGSS) practice of modeling, I have begun to see models everywhere in my teaching.  As part of my objective, I chose a workshop on using games to teach environmental science. This workshop looked like a good fit with a curricular area I want to emphasize more and I also wanted to explore the connection between games and models.

When I first saw that models and modeling would be part of the NGSS, I was concerned.  How well would this standard apply to the work I was doing with middle school and elementary school students?  Sure, a globe was a model, and so was the anatomical model of a human torso that let students take out and reassemble organs like the heart, lungs, intestines, the stomach, the liver, and so on.  But wasn’t model building in the scientific sense a pretty sophisticated activity?

The section of the NGSS site discussion Modeling as a Science and Engineering Practice explained that: 

Models include diagrams, physical replicas, mathematical representations, analogies, and computer simulations.

Somewhere else I read that someone had included simulation games in the category of models to use in science instruction.  Surely not all games are models, but many simulation games, computerized or not qualify using NGSS criteria, which includes:

·      Physical

·      Conceptual

·      External

·      Analogs

·      Shared

·      Clear

The games we tried out in our workshop were all clearly physical, external, and shared as we used game boards, game pieces, cards, and our own bodies to enact scenarios.  Games like Oh Deer and The Power Plant Game were definitely conceptual and a key part of their value was their abstraction and simplification of a complex underlying system.  These games help us focus on a limited set of essential elements and learn while having fun.