3rd World Farmer: A Simulation and Lesson in Extreme Adversity

            The realm of educational games is vast with every imaginable content area addressed. As educators, we have to utilize every possible method to get our content across to our students and this is where online educational games can come into play. I have utilized online educational games in my business classes in the past after carefully reviewing multiple games and selecting those I thought would fit my content and my students best. However, as a group process this was much more difficult, not to mention the task of creating a multimedia instructional block to teach our class about the game and how to play it. As a group, we selected a game, designed a rubric to evaluate our selection, chose a presentation platform, and agreed upon content to deliver. By assessing the aforementioned processes, I will reflect on the educational value of our chosen game in my content area, the criterion specifically selected to evaluate the validity of the game, and the effectiveness of our presentation platform.

            As a group, we evaluated many games before ultimately deciding upon 3^rd World Farmer, which is an educational game hosted by Gamesforchange.org in an effort to bring awareness to the plight of sustenance farmers in the Sub-Saharan region of Africa. As Gamesforchange.org (2015) states:

3^rd World Farmer touches on many subjects related to world hunger and poverty, such as corruption, trade barriers, armed conflict, and lack of education, sanitation, infrastructure and economic stability. These factors are brought into play through an intuitive and easy-to-play simulation, where the player makes choices primarily about crop types, livestock, tools, and structures for his farm, as well as managing the family members’ health, education, marriages and jobs.

The selection of this game as an educational tool came as a result of a collaboration between two male and two female graduate students at the University of Guam in the Master of Arts in Teaching program. In making the decision on the game we discussed various aspects to include: ease of gameplay, educational potential, and age appropriateness. Once the game was selected, we played the game and graded our attempts with a rubric.

            Our rubric creation was quite lengthy. We discussed many facets and finally agreed to on the same criteria: Layout & Design, Navigation, Instructions, Goals, Interaction, and Feedback. In my opinion the Instructions, Goals, and Feedback were the most important aspects of the gameplay. Instructions are important in any game because without instructions users wouldn’t know how to play the game. Unfortunately, I felt that 3^rd World Farmer was lacking in this department and I gave it a mediocre rating in this criteria. Next we had Goals, since without clearly defined goals, the game would be worthless. Fortunately, 3^rd World Farmer has a clear set of goals: your entire family must survive and grow enough crops to be self-sufficient. Along the way you could improve your family living by saving enough money to sponsor schools, communication services, infrastructure improvements, and medical clinics. I felt that Feedback was an important part of the game because it offered a realm where individuals could receive commentary and evaluation based on their performance. Each year in game the user receives an Annual Report which shows them how their crops did and how their finances and familial life are. Other than that however there isn’t much in the way of performance indicators within the game. I once again felt this was lacking and assigned it a rating of Average.

            After creating the rubric, we decided to utilize Prezi for our multimedia presentation. We looked at a few other platforms including Haiku Deck, Google Slides, and emaze and initially decided on Google. However, after playing around with the platform for a while we decided it resembled Microsoft’s PowerPoint too closely and moved on to Prezi. Prezi was a great platform that allowed us to do everything we wanted to include embedding a video from YouTube and our Rubric from Google Sheets. The creation of the presentation was seamless due to our simultaneous collaboration via Google Docs and Google Sheets. We even went as far as to continue utilizing Google Slides to place pictures into that we could then copy and paste into our Prezi. The usage of all these interactive tools made our work much more enjoyable and fiscally feasible as we didn’t have to drive around the island to meet with one another. Being a tech savvy individual I prefer online collaboration as I often would use Skype to conference call when working in the financial sector before I became a teacher.

            I will continue to utilize educational games in my classroom and in my content Social Studies. There are many games out there for my content but I strongly believe that 3^rd World Farmer is one that I will continue to use. I like the fact that the game was created by students in Denmark to bring awareness to situations where people are as 3^rd World Farmer states:

…dying from starvation in desperate situations that they never asked to be put in, all it takes for things to go wrong in this game is one bad harvest, an unfortunate encounter with corrupt officials, a raid by guerillas, a civil war, a sudden fluctuation in market prices, or any of the many other game events, that might never happen to families in industrialized countries (“About 3rd World Farmer,” n.d.).

I can utilize this game in the Social Studies arena to bring awareness to the plight in Sub-Saharan Africa, or to many other causes such as civil war, genocide, world hunger, climate change, etc.,  in either a World History or World Geography course (both of which I greatly hope I teach as this is my passion).

            This assignment was an eye opener for me on many level. Since I am normally a very introverted individual who prefers working alone than in groups, it was a positive experience to step out of my comfort zone to share both my experiences and expertise in the technology arena but more importantly, to learn from my group members. I feel our group did an excellent job despite a few bumps in the road to presenting. I can’t wait to utilize 3^rd World Farmer in my content area and bring awareness to this topic.

References:

About 3rd World Farmer. (n.d.). Retrieved June 12, 2015, from http://3rdworldfarmer.com/About.html

Play: 3rd World Farmer. (n.d.). Retrieved June 16, 2015, from http://www.gamesforchange.org/play/3rd-world-farmer/