The Long Game: Five Years of Simulating the Middle East

Abstract

Scholarly literature attesting to the benefits of role play in teaching international relations or political science subjects is abundant and universally positive. However, despite many case studies presenting snapshots of single examples, long term data concerning a role play exercise is difficult to find. This study presents student feedback data gathered from 10 iterations of the Middle East politics simulation carried out over 5 years from 2011-15. The data obtained from over 600 respondents establishes very clear trends in terms of satisfaction, engagement, and workload. The findings demonstrate that students can be significantly engaged in the subject matter through role plays and that they value these opportunities and the learning that ensues, even though it may represent more work than they are used to allotting to traditional assignments. The results show that year after year, successive student cohorts have made a clear judgement that extra work is worthwhile when it pays off against their perceived learning. The inference can also be drawn that they do not see this same pay off when completing essay type assignments.

Teaching About Terrorism Through Simulations

“…The role play lasts 12 days and activity can take place 24/7 during that period. Over the last two decades thousands of students have taken part in at least one occurrence of the MEPS (Hardy & Totman, 2017a).…”

“…The amount of work that students invest in the 12 days the MEPS runs is significant. Over six years of collecting data on the exercise, the average student reports around 4.5 hours a day as their involvement, far more time than they would probably spend on a task such as an essay (Hardy & Totman, 2017a). This leads to great depth and breadth of knowledge, not just regarding the role they are playing, but those other roles and issues that they will interact with.…”

“…For purposes of this chapter, though, the terms 'simulation' and 'role play' will be used interchangeably. For a fuller description of the task and its assessment practices, see Hardy & Totman (2012, 2013, 2017a. For a discussion of how the game has evolved technologically over time, including student feedback to changes in the interface, see Hardy and Totman, 2017b.…”

“…For data presented after the five-year mark on how students have evaluated their learning experience of the MEPS see (Hardy & Totman, 2017a).…”

Teaching an old game new tricks: Long‐term feedback on a re‐designed online role play

“…Not all the data gathered in the survey is presented below. Due to the wide ranging nature of the information sought, some of the results (such as those to do with subject engagement, workload and teamwork) are outside of the scope of this piece and are presented elsewhere, such as Hardy and Totman (2016).…”