Forget Donald. The Contender stages your own, better presidential debate

The Contender is a tabletop game that combines the rhetoric of political campaigns and the mechanics of Cards Against Humanity, all of which raises a thorny interpretive question: Would tonight’s second Republican presidential debate be improved if it were replaced by a televised game of The Contender?

To answer this question, let us consider the rules of each debate. CNN’s primetime debate and the straggler’s undercard that precede it surely have rules, which probably involve speaking times and not interrupting others. If history is any indicator, those rules will probably be ignored by at least one of the candidates, and few—if any—repercussions will be meted out. (Just ask Megyn Kelly how that system works.)

we’re going to be doing this for a good, long time

The Contender, on the other hand, has a certain amount of flexibility built into its design. In the game’s Kickstarter video, its developers explain that they are curious to see how its rules will be bent and toyed with. This seems preferable to the faux naiveté of network news anchors. Anyhow, should you really care about the rules, here’s how The Contender works: One player assumes the role of the moderator and selects a topic card from a central deck. The other players formulate answers using the fact and arguments in their hands. The players’ cards are based on great moments in previous campaigns. The moderator decides which player has the best answer to, and that player assumes the role of moderator for the next round. The Contender is simultaneously more structured and more flexible than a presidential debate. It’s the best of both worlds!

The game ends…at some point…surely it must? This appears to be an accurate description of both The Contender and America’s endless campaign seasons, but I can only speak with any certainty to the former. Look, we’re going to be doing this for a good, long time—well, at least for a long time—so you might as well settle in. And while you’re settling in, you might as well have some fun. At this point, most citizens are resigned to their debates amounting to little more than talking point competitions, but The Contender’s mechanics helpfully reveal just how mechanical these events are. Thus, in one of this election season’s great many ironies, tonight’s CNN debate might well be improved if it were replaced by a game that seeks to mock this very event.

Find out more about The Contender on its website.

Forget Donald. The Contender stages your own, better presidential debate – Kill Screen – Videogame Arts & Culture..

Are College Lectures Unfair?


Credit: Gérard DuBois

DOES the college lecture discriminate? Is it biased against undergraduates who are not white, male and affluent?

The notion may seem absurd on its face. The lecture is an old and well-established tradition in education. To most of us, it simply is the way college courses are taught. Even online courses are largely conventional lectures uploaded to the web.

Yet a growing body of evidence suggests that the lecture is not generic or neutral, but a specific cultural form that favors some people while discriminating against others, including women, minorities and low-income and first-generation college students. This is not a matter of instructor bias; it is the lecture format itself — when used on its own without other instructional supports — that offers unfair advantages to an already privileged population.

The partiality of the lecture format has been made visible by studies that compare it with a different style of instruction, called active learning. This approach provides increased structure, feedback and interaction, prompting students to become participants in constructing their own knowledge rather than passive recipients.

Research comparing the two methods has consistently found that students over all perform better in active-learning courses than in traditional lecture courses. However, women, minorities, and low-income and first-generation students benefit more, on average, than white males from more affluent, educated families.

There are several possible reasons. One is that poor and minority students are disproportionately likely to have attended low-performing schools and to have missed out on the rich academic and extracurricular offerings familiar to their wealthier white classmates, thus arriving on campus with less background knowledge. This is a problem, since research has demonstrated that we learn new material by anchoring it to knowledge we already possess. The same lecture, given by the same professor in the same lecture hall, is actually not the same for each student listening; students with more background knowledge will be better able to absorb and retain what they hear.

Active-learning courses deliberately structure in-class and out-of-class assignments to ensure that students repeatedly engage with the material. The instructors may pose questions about the week’s reading, for example, and require students to answer the questions online, for a grade, before coming to class. This was the case in an introductory biology course taught by Kelly A. Hogan at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill. In a study conducted with Sarah L. Eddy of the University of Washington, the researchers compared this “moderate structure” course (which included ungraded guided-reading questions and in-class active-learning exercises in addition to the graded online assignments) to the same course taught in a “low structure” lecture format.

In the structured course, all demographic groups reported completing the readings more frequently and spending more time studying; all groups also achieved higher final grades than did students in the lecture course. At the same time, the active-learning approach worked disproportionately well for black students — halving the black-white achievement gap evident in the lecture course — and for first-generation college students, closing the gap between them and students from families with a history of college attendance.

Other active-learning courses administer frequent quizzes that oblige students to retrieve knowledge from memory rather than passively read it over in a textbook. Such quizzes have been shown to improve retention of factual material among all kinds of students.

At the University of Texas at Austin, the psychology professors James W. Pennebaker and Samuel D. Gosling instituted a low-stakes quiz at the start of each meeting of their introductory psychology course. Compared with students who took the same course in a more traditional format, the quizzed students attended class more often and achieved higher test scores; the intervention also reduced by 50 percent the achievement gap between more affluent and less affluent students.

Minority, low-income, and first-generation students face another barrier in traditional lecture courses: a high-pressure atmosphere that may discourage them from volunteering to answer questions, or impair their performance if they are called on. Research in psychology has found that academic performance is enhanced by a sense of belonging — a feeling that students from these groups often acutely lack.

Such obstacles also confront female students enrolled in math and science courses; a 2014 study found that although women made up 60 percent of large introductory biology courses, they accounted for less than 40 percent of those responding to instructors’ questions.

The act of putting one’s own thoughts into words and communicating them to others, research has shown, is a powerful contributor to learning. Active-learning courses regularly provide opportunities for students to talk and debate with one another in a collaborative, low-pressure environment.

In a study to be published later this year, researchers from the University of Massachusetts Amherst and Yale University compare a course in physical chemistry taught in traditional lecture style to the same course taught in a “flipped” format, in which lectures were moved online and more time was devoted to in-class problem-solving activities. Exam performance over all was nearly 12 percent higher in the flipped class. Female students were among those who benefited the most, allowing them to perform at almost the same level as their male peers.

Given that active-learning approaches benefit all students, but especially those who are female, minority, low-income and first-generation, shouldn’t all universities be teaching this way?

Are College Lectures Unfair? – The New York Times.

Check out how one college is teaching students how to prevent rape: with a video game.

A new game developed at Carnegie Mellon University aims to change the way people react when they witness sexual harassment and violence.

The game is called Decisions That Matter, and it follows a group of college-age friends on the night of a party. Along the way, members of the group face a number of challenges and uncomfortable situations that people of all ages might find themselves in every day, ranging from street harassment to unwelcome advances from a stranger or friend.

In each situation involving harassment or assault, the player must choose how to react.

For example, in the street harassment scenario, the player has to decide whether to say something to the stranger, dismiss the stranger, or ignore the stranger.

I spoke over e-mail with CMU’s coordinator of gender programs and sexual violence prevention Jess Klein to learn more about the game’s history.

Essentially, each semester, a CMU class called Morality Play: Laboratory for Interactive Media and Values Education takes up a cause. Professors Andy Norman and Ralph Vetuccio selected sexual violence prevention as this semester’s theme and went to Klein for some assistance.

“They wanted to come up with some sort of multimedia tool that would help students understand and educate them on sexual violence prevention, but also a tool that would be useful to the folks on campus working directly with survivors and violence prevention,” Klein said. “I am that person!”

Previous Morality Play classes have examined topics like income inequality and privacy.

So many existing “anti-rape” tools put the focus on the victim, and few address the perpetrators and bystanders. They wanted this to be different.

“I was upfront with them from the very beginning with regards to how I felt about ‘prevention products,'” Klein said. “The apps, the nail polish, the ‘anti-rape’ underwear – it’s just all too much, and those products ultimately put the onus of prevention on the survivor.”

All else aside, the biggest problem with “anti-rape” products that focus on the victim is that they don’t address the cause of rape: people who rape.

“The ONLY way that we can eliminate power-based violence in our society is to focus on why and how it flourishes and exists in a culture,” said Klein. “… Instead of risk-reduction tactics, or ‘secondary prevention,’ we must practice primary prevention — eliminating power-based violence on a cultural and social level through education.”

“Being an active bystander is about intervening long before anything can happen, giving folks the tools to have conversations about sexism, the role of masculinity, rape culture, challenging rape myths, and more.” — Jess Klein of Carnegie Mellon University

A focus on primary prevention needs to include educational tools for bystanders and witnesses.

“One of the key areas of primary prevention is bystander intervention,” Klein explained, “although it must be done the right way. Being an active bystander is not just about teaching someone tools to intervene when an assault is happening. Being an active bystander is about intervening long before anything can happen, giving folks the tools to have conversations about sexism, the role of masculinity, rape culture, challenging rape myths, and more.”

According to Klein, catcallers are usually ignored. Because of that, they’re not held accountable for their treatment of women and might eventually engage in worse behaviors.

“There is no product on the market that I have witnessed that focuses solely on the bystander experience, especially the way that it is presented with Decisions That Matter.”

If nothing else, Klein hopes that players can empathize with the characters and situations shown in the game.

“I hope that people can really see themselves in these situations and think hard about what they would actually do,” she told me. “I absolutely believe that it will help people better understand the nuances and the complexities of sexual violence, but also show that sexual violence is on a continuum. Catcalling is a form of sexual violence. Unwanted touching or groping is a form of sexual violence. These things are violations of people’s choices and their bodies. I also believe that this will help people understand the importance of intervening or not intervening.”

If the game manages to equip even a single person with the tools they need to step in as a bystander in these situations, it will be a huge success.

Decisions That Matter is an innovative tool in the fight against sexual violence that educates without being condescending and is something men and women of all ages should check out. It doesn’t paint the perpetrators as cartoonish villains, and it shows that there’s not always a right or wrong answer in these situations. It is an eye-opening experience.

Check out how one college is teaching students how to prevent rape: with a video game..

Learning by design