Beyond the Prisoner’s Dilemma

Having read Global warming and the Prisoner’s Dilemma yesterday, I spent the evening doing some fast background reading on game theory and minimax. Today I tried using the same clip with a Year 6 [10-11 years old] primary class. I, too, found that they responded well. They were animated and excited by the intellectual ideas of classification, weighting of choices, minimisation and maximisation of different outcomes. They were also interested in the general idea of using such methods to explore problem solving choices, and rapidly moved towards trying out the grid arrangement on more complex decision spaces and problems more directly related to their own experience.

One of the cases they worked on was a proposal currently under consideration and consultation for development of an area between school buildings and playing fields. Four main options have been mooted: a pair of asphalt tennis courts, a garden, or a semi wild “science area” complete with pond and simulated bog. There are also six funding options: split the available pot of money funds with a proposed new performance area in the school hall, annex all the money for the outdoor area, or work without funds and leave all the money for a better indoor development - and in each case work mount a special supplementary fundraising effort or not. So, they were planning in a twenty four cell grid like the one below.

These are my own pupils, I have known them since September, but I was astonished at how much they got from this and the degree of sophistication in their handling of it. The application to science was clearly seen and explored. Since they had followed a “funding vs benefit” example, I took them on to explore the idea of how finite public funding for science should be allocated: that, too, went extraordinarily well.

[contributed by Rose]