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This is my fourth ...in the classroom session report. I'm teaching a class called “Closed System Economics” at Shanghai University as an elective for second and third year university students in China. All my students have various business type majors. None of them knew that the class was going to be about board games when they signed up, in fact with the Chinese translation of the title they thought it was going to be a historical lecture about North Korea.
My class format is to show video reviews / tutorials for them to figure out roughly how to play. I also hand out rules summaries to every student so they all have them for reference. This is something that I've learned to do, in the first few sessions I gave one set of rules per group and I've found that giving them to every student really helps with the understanding. They have to write two session reports for games we've played over the course and produce their own video review for the final exam.
You can see my session reports for the other games played previously in the course. They are For Sale, Saboteur, and Container.
After a short lecture at the beginning of class about how things were going I showed the students the two videos on Modern Art. These videos are fast paced flash animated videos which I knew were above the students English level. The positive thing about them was that they had lots of text too, not just speaking which does help. I then handed out the copies of Modern Art.
Set-up went pretty well and all the students managed to get their starting money and starting hand of cards. We went over the different auction mechanics but it seemed that just about every group was unsure about how to start the game. I came to realize that they didn't know what the value of the paintings were. The first time you're playing in the beginning when you don't know about the game it gets a bit daunting to figure out what to buy or sale. I encouraged them along, promising that it would all become clear after the first round.
The first round definitely took much longer than any other. No one knew if they wanted the round to end and what the benefit of ending a round was. One group even called me over saying that one student won the game because she had bought each of the five paintings. Once there was an ending and I showed each group about the value of the paintings based on the number sold I started to see the wheels turn, strategy wheels.
The next moment of strategic discovery came when they realized, after round two, that you add the previous rounds values to the current rounds three highest paintings. Then the money started to really flow.
I got the impression that they liked the game and I wished we had enough time to give it another go but it ended right about the same time that class was over.
It's harder for me to assess how the different strategies of the five groups played out because it is a more difficult game to observe and see what is happening in the overall picture. Each value board looked very different by the end but that was to be expected with random card deals and different players. I didn't get a total money for each group but I do know they wrote them down for their session reports.
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