Digital Game-based Learning in Civic Education – The Chancellor Simulator

In the digital age, civic education also has to review its didactic methods and approaches. Is there a need for digital tools to educate digital natives (Palfrey and Gasser 2011)? In this context, one promising approach is digital game-based learning (Prensky 2003), for example, through serious games. During the last years, more and more short serious games for civic education were published, like “The Cat in the Hijab” or “The Unstoppables”. However, there is limited research about the effectiveness of such serious games in the context of civic education (Motyka 2018). It is also unclear how digital games can be successfully implemented in the classroom context. Motyka and Zehe (2014) suggest to embed serious games into a structured teaching and learning context and to accompany the gaming phase by an introduction in the beginning and a debriefing at the end. In our study, we investigate the effects of the “Kanzlersimulator” (https://www.planet-schule.de/demokratie/kanzlersimulator/), a German browser game, which was developed and published in 2013 and has been continuously updated since. In the “Kanzlersimulator”, the participant plays the chancellor of Germany and has to bring legislation through parliament by striking deals with the parties of his governing coalition. The game can be played for different time spans and ends with the next election and the result of that election. We investigate the effects of playing the game for 30 minutes on students’ subjective political knowledge, their internal political efficacy, interest in politics and openness for political compromise by use of a standardized questionnaire (pre-post-test). Additionally, we implement a value-added approach (Mayer 2014) and collect data from two different interventions, with one group only playing the game without instructions and debriefing and one group playing the game with additional instructions before and a debriefing after the game. Data has already been collected for the first group with 150 participants, showing small but significant positive effects on participants’ internal efficacy and subjective knowledge regarding the role of the chancellor, but also, unexpectedly, a negative effect on their openness for compromises in politics. Data for the second group will be collected in February and analyzed thereafter giving special attention to group comparison.