The flag-game.
Aim: Make the students reflect on human nature and behaviour
Equipment: Nothing
Time: 15 minutes
Level: Middle and youth
Content:
Works best with 6-14 students
· Divide the students into two rows: Team A and Team B
· The teacher holds the flag (paper, cloth etc.)
· There are two ways of getting points:
o When the teacher says start, one from each row who stand opposite each other try to get hold of the flag. This gives one point.
o But if the person from the other row touches the person with the flag, the point goes to the other team.
· Game is over when all the people in the rows have tried twice.
· The team with most points have won.
Following-up:
- Usually the students start to run towards the flag, but after a while they notice that they usually lose the point because it is hard to avoid touching the person with the flag.
- After a while the students tend to stay standing and wait instead of running forward.
· It is important to relate this to conflict situations around the world.
· One common solution in world politics is to grab what one want as quickly as possible without thinking of the best solution for all.
· It takes often a long time and many conflicts until one understands that it pays back to consider a situation before one take a good that many people need or want.
Questions for the students:
- How did you understand the game?
- Why did you change strategy during the game?
- Why to you think we did this exercise (If you think of that today’s topic is conflict resolution)?
- If you draw parallels to the world situation of today, are there examples of countries that have run towards goods without thinking of the consequences (for example USA in Iraq and Pakistan and India’s fight for water in Kashmir. Most conflicts are about access to resources)?
- Are there alternative ways of dealing with situations where there is more than one actor that wants one resource? (You can look at Galtung’s orange-example: In how many ways can two people share an orange?)