Using Strategic Games to Illustrate Environmental Policy Concepts for Undergraduates

A growing body of literature highlights the benefits of using classroom games to help students understand policy concepts. In practice, however, instructors often use games as ad-hoc activities to increase student engagement, rather than as an integrated way to consolidate student understanding of core course topics. The goal of this paper is to help instructors design and systematically integrate games into their undergraduate policy courses. Drawing on our experiences as instructors and researchers, we describe how we developed a sequence of games to help undergraduate students understand three of the core concepts in environmental policy, and how we integrated them into our undergraduate courses on environmental policy. We then provide a basic framework for instructors who are interested in designing games that illustrate core policy concepts by simulating real-world policy interactions.