Innovative, Digital and International – Online Simulation Games as a New Way of Higher Education Teaching

Simulation games are often used in civic education (Massing 1997) and many researches displayed their educational value in school (Oberle et al. 2018, Oberle & Leunig 2017) as well as in political science education (Fink 2015, Lohmann 2018, Duchatelet 2019). Similar positive expectations exist for digital simulation games (van Eck 2006, Gabriel 2012, Le et al. 2013), one of the expected benefits is that digital or online simulation games can be played together over a far distance, giving teachers and students the possibility to work together in an international classroom (Kaiser et al. 2017). But there are not many successful examples of online simulation games used in higher education. Therefore, in this contribution an online simulation game for political science education is displayed and first results of a qualitative study will be presented. The online simulation game was developed together with the Berlin simulation game company planpolitik and was played in December 2019 over two weeks as a seminar together with students from the universities of Antwerp, Göttingen and Krakow. The topic was lobbyism in the EU and the participants played members of the European Commission, administrators and lobbyists in the first week and switched in the second week to members of the European Parliament and lobbyists. Therefore they had both perspectives: in one week they had to play a lobbyist and in the other they had to play a member of the administration/legislative. Their common goal was to draft legislation to reduce CO2 emissions in the traffic sector. Additionally to taking part in the simulation game the students had to master specific tasks in the game, some alone and some in a group, including writing policy papers, press addresses, stakeholder analyses and self-reflections. These tasks then were graded in the simulation through the teacher and the students got feedback during the simulation game, helping them performing later tasks. The complementary study analyses the self-reflections of the participants about the online simulation game. Six interviews with participants were held to find out what they learned during the simulation and which skills they developed. Additionally further interviews and self-reflections will be made after another simulation at the end of April 2020.