The Global Challenge Project

Reviews of Global Challenge

2011-08-21T11:31:00.000-07:00

Lee,

I really appreciate you getting me a copy of this last month. As I prepare for my upcoming school year I am very intrigued by it, and how I might assimilate it into my current curriculum to enhance my current units/lessons. I am considering some modifications to make it "fit" better with my program, routines and curriculum.

That said, I am very impressed with it on paper, and can really see where it could totally enhance learning and student motivation. This is giving me great food for thought as I ponder how far I want to jump into this and experiment with it in my world history classes - as it would require some major cuts in units to free up time for it. Thanks for putting the possibility out there for all of us that have inquired about Global Challenge!

-- Jeff Smith, MA. Ed

Lee,

I have initiated Global Challenge this year and I am getting a great response from my kids. As you know I teach students who have emotional and social disabilities. I have made a few changes to make it work for my classroom situation. I will list them below:

1. The kids fight for more armies and take over unclaimed countries from the world map when they earn 10 armies. Each country starts with three armies.

2. Kids do battle with each other and there are three rounds of battles where each student can win another army or lose one.

3. For each round I have set it up where the students turn in Blooms Taxonomy questions they developed from their notes. I then ask them their own questions back at them. I do this because the students are all learning different subjects within one class.
The kids are showing lots of excitement in earning armies. I am in the process of creating an excel chart to track categories like gdp, population, land area, imports and exports. After each unit we identify a winner for each category.

That is just a brief summary of what is going on. I feel I have a lot more to organize to continue making it work with my class, but we are off to a great start! I will get you another update closer to Christmas.

Eric Riester
Social Studies Teacher
To see other reviews / comments concerning Global Challenge, please see: http://linkd.in/nzwHv2

Game Based Learning for Social Studies Teachers / Workshop Information

2011-07-11T10:22:00.000-07:00

A quick search on Google or Twitter of the terms “Gamify” and "Game-based learning" will show you that this topic is getting a lot of attention right now. Schools and organizations are turning their attention to the power of games and projects and how they motivate people to learn and perform. In the business world, many companies have turned to game or point-based systems in order to motivate employees and customers. Before terms like “gamification,” presenter Lee Chazen began by taking a simple game – then adding layer upon layer of content and ideas in order to teach his world history classes. Continuing in this manner, year after year, he eventually put his entire curriculum into a game format and called it Global Challenge. The game grew in popularity over the years, was featured on local news, eventually became a community access TV game show and is now sold online to teachers across the country. This workshop will show you the importance of games and projects, why they work so well and how you can set up Global Challenge (or a game like it) in your classes.

Questions or comments?

Send your inquiries here.

How do you play Global Challenge?

2011-07-05T10:54:00.000-07:00

Students are randomly distributed approximately 190 cards - representing the countries of the world.

They are given the choice to either protect the countries they have, acquire new countries or work for peace.

In order to pursue their goals (of peace, new territory or maintaining their land) they have to correctly answer questions from the text book (details of how this is done are in the rule book).

Students write out 20 game questions each week - in seven categories (see rule book for details).

All class assignments, quizzes and tests convert to Global Challenge Dollars -- and are then used for purchases (armies, weapons, etc.)

At the end of play (usually 20 rounds) winners are determined in several categories.

Students have the option to pursue peace by answering questions correctly and declaring half (roughly 95 countries) safe from attack.

Teachers and students are free to modify the game to suit the purposes of the class.

What Do Students Learn by Playing Global Challenge?

2011-03-17T19:34:00.000-07:00

The whole concept of Global Challenge allows for the participants to recognize their strengths and, just as importantly, to search out the strengths of others. What students ultimately find out is that there is no way to win alone. One cannot be successful without respect and tolerance for team members.

One of the most important features of Global Challenge is that different styles of learning are actually rewarded. It is highly recommended that as students make alliances and put together their teams, they take into consideration different areas of expertise, picking the financial genius, the diplomat, the strategist and so on. In this way, all the students can more fully discover and develop their particular strengths.

Students soar through the textbook, Internet and maps in search of questions that are broken down into seven categories. After all, how much learning takes place when one answers Houghton Mifflin's version of an important question at the end of each chapter? But have students write their own questions, which they answer for points, money and political influence and one has just guaranteed intrinsic motivation. Handing in homework on time guarantees the student and his team 20,000 dollars. No dirty looks from the teacher when a student fails to turn in homework… just less money to enter into the checkbook and not so friendly looks from teammates.

This is how things operate in a free market place. And for those that get behind, do we consider social welfare, or is it survival of the fittest? This makes for interesting class discussions, or interesting unit on economics or human nature. Don't think that the teacher never gets involved. Quite the opposite -- the teacher will have to think constantly to keep up with the changes rapidly taking place in this free thinking market place of ideas… a video on philosophy here, a lecture on economics there, conflict resolution… all self perpetuating, idea driven, emotions, psychology all the human factors that make this a true microcosm or small universe.

In the end, the students have had a chance to synthesize a wide variety of information in the context of a unified curriculum. English, math, social studies and science are meshed with finance, communication and organization to provide the students with cohesive real world skills that will serve them well as they move on to college and/or the work place. There will be aggressors and peaceniks, and those who walk the middle attempting to stay out of the fray, but no one is uninvolved or escapes decision making or contribution to the whole in some way. This is a classroom experience, and all get to see for themselves the patterns of history. More importantly, the student discovers where he or she fits in the context of the world.

More Than a Classroom Game

2011-02-10T12:55:00.000-08:00

How do you get students to cover 40 chapters of a text book, write out and answer 400 of their own questions and take notes on over 1,000 facts? Answer: have them play Global Challenge.

Global Challenge:

allows students to write up as many as 400 of their own questions.

prepares students for tests.

teaches real work skills.

allows you to easily integrate your own curriculum.

rewards students in different areas of intelligence.

Global Challenge is more than just a game, but is a semester-long project which teaches geography, history, government and more.

Learning from the bottom up

2009-12-26T22:24:00.000-08:00

What if learning in the classroom was more of an emergent process like the growth of a city as in the game Sim City? What if one idea were to lead to the next to where students needed very little supervision and where they covered the educational bases but also developed areas of their own interest? Welcome to the world of Global Challenge.

Global Challenge is a unique opportunity for students to live in a microcosm or world within a world. In this book, the world is laid out in easy to follow steps. Teacher and student follow these steps with daily activity guides. But once it starts, anything can happen. Sure, the patterns of history are all the same, but outcomes are different. “A” students become challenged and your former “F” students see a chance for success. In the end everyone wins and there is something for every type of student and every type of learner.

It starts with the random distribution of United Nations countries. From there, students begin their research to find population, capital, per capita income, gross domestic product, historical and cultural facts. This is the basis for all game strategy. Students quickly learn about geography, economics and the politics of world power before the game even starts.

Just like the ever-changing world we live in, classroom dynamics change weekly as the class simulates the migratory and social patterns of history. Students start alone, but quickly form alliances. Nations emerge, and towards the end of the semester, we have all the conditions of the cold war.

By reading this book, you will quickly learn how to get your students to devour information from the textbook, magazines, newspapers and Internet. All information is now money, protection, power or the key to peace. No longer just test material, knowledge becomes power, freedom, and peace. You will learn how to organize information into seven categories, and how to create a classroom economy out of all work. Students will actually ask you if they can compile extra information, or do extra work for money.

In fact, a furry of activity will take place just because of the economy that you have created. Students will meet on their own at lunch, before or after school, at home, or online. Don’t be surprised when you see your “F” student in the library with maps and books. Instructions for creating the map, game cards, game questions, checkbooks and point systems are all detailed inside. Topics for discussion, research projects, possible scenarios, lessons for anger management are all contained inside this book. In fact, a full semester is all laid out for you. Self contained and self managed, Global Challenge will allow you to leave your class if necessary. You might just be able to attend a meeting, meet with a parent or take care of your paper work.

The Story Behind Global Challenge

2009-10-28T16:20:00.000-07:00

"It’s your first day as a teacher. You walk into a noisy class of sophomores. Everything has been leading up to this moment. You finished a bachelor’s degree, went on to take courses for your teacher certification and completed 16 weeks as a non-paid student intern.

You ask the students to stand up for a little warm-up exercise and a student named “Butch” in the front row tells you to “suck it.” During the first week, you see students slouched in their seats, not bringing materials to class, tapping fingers on the desk, swearing at one another and directing their anger and frustrations toward you – the person who wants to help them."

You can read the rest of the story here.

For visually oriented people...

2009-10-28T16:06:00.000-07:00

If you're more of a visually oriented person, you might want to check out Global Challenge on Visual CV. Click here.

For teachers who don't have time to read through a lot of text, remember that you'll get one free hour of phone support with the purchase of the product.

A Closer Look at the Game

2009-08-10T13:18:00.000-07:00

In Global Challenge (a curriculum for 6th – 12th grades) students answer questions in seven different categories in order to earn points, money and political influence. Before this begins, they put together a map, are distributed different countries, and are required to do a great deal of research. They must know the per capita income, population, major industry, capital and something of interest for each country they are given. Also, before the game even starts, they must put together a philosophy or guide to how they will play the game.

Students read each chapter of an assigned text, and formulate their own 20 questions each week – divided into vocabulary (4), historical fact (5), geography (4), people (4), trivia (1) and something from another core class (math, science, English or social studies) (1). These questions become the basis for the game and for future tests. In other words, they will need to write out as many questions as are specified above. These questions can be turned in to the honors students for quick review, then over to the teacher. Points will be awarded if the questions are correct and useable. United Nations members will be required to review these, make adjustments, and then turn them into official game questions. Every new unit the teacher introduces results in the making of new questions. At the end of the unit, the teacher may devise a test or quiz over the material covered by game questions. This way, if a student does poorly during the game, she or he can compensate by scoring high on quizzes and tests. These should be handed in each week, and turned into useable cash upon being graded (1 pt. = $1,000).

Students sit in a horseshoe configuration facing the map. Game play progresses clockwise as students or teams (depending on phase of the game) are asked three questions. Each question has a value of 5 points or $5,000. If the student gets two of the three correct, she or he has the opportunity to declare peace on or take over the country in question. This continues for a specified number of rounds until game play stops (usually 20 rounds).

At this point winners are declared in several categories (see rule book).

Game play moves the students through four stages of history: Nomad, city-state, nation State, and Super-Power. Each stage is symbolically represented by number of students in a team (to represent the state of world history that is being studied). The classroom will steadily evolve (order out of chaos) as allegiances are formed, until they reach the Super-Power stage. Just as in the cold war, the two sides square off. There is an optional fifth stage, which opens the class up to creative discussion of where they think the world is headed.

Game play can stop at anytime, either by peaceful treaty between players or when 50% or 90 countries of the world have achieved the status of peace. Peace is declared on a country after the player correctly answers two questions and decides not to attack anyone. At various points during the game, the teacher may wish to insert a unit plan or engage the class in discussion about the relevance to history or current political conditions.

Teams research their countries, paint and piece together a giant world map and study textbook and other relevant reading material in preparation. If they answer their questions correctly, they will earn $5,000 in Global Challenge money, and will potentially achieve peace or the takeover of another country.

Every country taken over in Global Challenge earns the player or team the current Per Capita Income of that country. There are equal bonuses to work for peace. As a result of all these incentives, students study furiously in an attempt to do well at the game. They also - and this one is somewhat hard to believe - ask to do extra work. On a weekly basis, students will come up with all kinds of ideas and the teacher may find them asking to compile data, create a chart, do detail work on the map, compile new game questions, create theme songs, or banners, make anthems or team logos.

Students engage in a fury of activity communicating facts, ideas and plans to one another both at school and at home. There is never a question of homework - as it is an ongoing activity. Students can easily access and exchange all kinds of information at all hours of the day and night, by use of the Internet. This is an ongoing, emergent, cross-curricular phenomenon.

The Theories Behind Global Challenge

2009-08-10T13:11:00.000-07:00

As a teacher of high school social studies, I began experimenting with the idea of using an interactive game not as a side-unit of instruction nor as a supplement to the curriculum but as the curriculum itself. In doing this, I became more of a facilitator (creating a feedback loop) and switched from the use of lecture to an open-ended game format in order to deliver course content. I changed the structure of my classes to give students more opportunities for creative and critical thinking. As the classes changed in this way from the use of a traditional hierarchy to a lateral distribution of power, or heterarchy, I observed profound changes. The classes experienced a major increase in participation and, arguably, thinking as a result of complex, higher order behavior.

During the use of this game I realized something interesting was taking place; a phenomenon of sorts. It remained an idea without a model for many years until two things happened:

1. I discovered a book by the famous biologist Edward O. Wilson entitled Consilience: The Unity of Knowledge (1998). This book opened up the door on how one might merge ideas and subject areas in order to discover universal truths. There was occasional mention in the book about how physicists do not work enough with mathematicians and biologists, even though one might find answers for their area of study in a completely different discipline. The idea occurred that, by analogy and metaphor, professionals could find universal answers. One might even see the possibility for a “borderless,” 24-hour learning environment, uninhibited by pre-fabricated, school-imposed barriers on learning.

2. On a trip to England in early 2002, I discovered another book in the London Museum of Science called Emergence: The Connected Lives of Ants, Brains, Cities and Software (2001) by science writer Steven Johnson. This book exposed some other ideas, mainly the notion that the most productive and creative behavior seemed to happen from the ground up (Johnson, 2001). This book, and discussions with a long-time friend, led to the discovery of something more profound – chaos theory. Chaos theory disproved the second law of thermodynamics and offered hope that things do not have to disintegrate.

Since entropy and thermodynamics are important to the model or metaphor being presented in this paper, they are worthy of deeper analysis here. According to Gleick

(1987) the concept of entropy derives from thermodynamics and is a part of the Second Law (of thermodynamics). Thermodynamics, according to the Encarta World English Dictionary (1999), refers to a branch of physics dealing with the conversions of energy from one form to another “and how these affect temperature, pressure, volume, mechanical action and work.”

Gleick wrote that entropy was the tendency of systems in the universe to move towards a state of increasing disorder. Gleick also noted that this term has taken root in the non-scientific world and has woven itself into our culture. He gave as examples the non- scientific explanations for disintegrating societies and economic decay. People, it seems, use the term entropy to describe any system that is likely to fall apart.

In thermodynamics, certain things are true such as losing heat when transferring one form of energy to another. This would make perfect efficiency impossible. In addition, Gleick (1987) pointed out that the universe, because of this, was a “one way street.” A process tending towards disorder could not be reversed. These things may be true in the world of thermodynamics, he pointed out, but are not so true in complexity. He went on to say that thermodynamics did not explain the creating of amino acids, microorganisms, self-reproducing plants and animals, and the complexity, even, of the human brain. Systems such as these did not fall victim to entropy, but rose to a higher level.

When Johnson (2001) wrote about non-equilibrium thermodynamics, he spoke of the work done by Ilya Prigogine in the 1950s, and defined non-equilibrium thermodynamics as “environments where the laws of entropy are temporarily overcome, and higher-level order may spontaneously emerge out of underlying chaos” (p. 52).

Putting these things together, one might move in the direction of accepting complexity as a better system to use when defining and explaining the social system in use in education. Where thermodynamics refers to the transfer and conversion of energy, complexity is more of the working model, large enough to explain all systems. Entropy has become an excuse from which cynics can look to explain disintegration of social systems. When, in fact, such disintegration may be because of faulty design, imposition of too much order, lack of balance in the system and, most importantly, a model not suitable to handle random variables. At this point, these are suppositions but are worth considering.

The question naturally emerged as to whether there was some way to make sense of all the disarray and confusion people found in their personal and professional lives. What if there was a larger order to things that humans simply were not seeing, one where order would arise out of seemingly meaningless interactions? What if chaos and confusion were part of a larger design and could lead to greater things?

From a psychological, emotional, and social viewpoint, this could revolutionize the way people think and interact, just knowing that everyday friction and random interactions might actually lead to something. In Consilience, Wilson (1998) argued that there may be a higher order, one that fuses or synthesizes many subjects at the same time; that there might be, in fact, some universal laws that underlie all knowledge. This made an excellent case for interdisciplinary studies. After reading Johnson, however, I became more interested in emergence and chaos theory, thinking that such ideas might make for an appropriate model for education. These two ideas, if synthesized, could form a model for a higher order of learning based on complexity.