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Has anyone ever tried this sort of thing? The general idea is that you are playing a game but some of the teams might be uneven, have different rules or harder questions. Anyway, what you want is to to try to give a real feeling that the game is not fair and that many of the teams have no chance of winning.
Before anybody gets truly angry or upset you explain that there are a lot of people in the world that feel like life is like this. Different rules for different people, making some more likely to succeed than others. Maybe you, the teacher will be acting as a judge for this game and apply the rules differently to different teams.
The whole point is for the students to be able to understand discrimination in context through experience. The students then have a writing assignment to answer a few questions about this experience and about discrimination in their own country.
I am planning to use this in a Japanese Junior High School where most of the students cannot really imagine what descrimination feels like - they also seem to feel (IMHO) that this is only a problem outside of Japan (not true!).
Any opinions about this idea? Has anyone tried this sort of thing???? How did it go??? Suggestions and comments please!!!

Muttman

I saw an excellent article at http://www.morphinenation.com about games of this nature. I'll try to find the proper url.

I found tremendous discrimination in Japan and the students understood what it was and how prevelant it was everywhere. There is discrimination between the language in Tokyo and Osaka, between boys and girls, between people who are from the south and the north based on looks, and for all students who have foreign parents. There is discrimination against Koreans and against older women, against women in general as the men are served first and so on. This is not to say that this doesn't happen in other countries of course. We have seen what has happened in New Orleans in the States and what happens in Canada against Native Canadians and on and on. No country has a truly discrimination free society as far as I have experienced. But it is always good to point this out and get them to think about it and your game sounds interesting.
I did the same kind of thing with students in Canada but based my teams on blue eyes, brown eyes and other coloured eyes. That would be pretty impossible in Japan. My students were more careful about their behaviour after we did this experiment.

One activity the sixth grade teachers do where I work is-
1. give each student a different colored sticker- there is usually one student whose sticker isn't the same as anyone else's
2. all students (for the day, that's how long they do this) are supposed to dislike him/ her (they have cooties/ lice/ are dumb/ some dumb reason for not liking him/ her)
3. another color gets preferential treatment, snacks and soda in a seperate room without a teacher while everyone writes an essay on discrimination
4. this has to continue at lunch. you sit with the people who have the same color sticker as you, you can't even let the one who is all alone sit at you table
This activity is usually done while talking about WWII and the Holocaust, since one of the causes of the Holocaust was discrimination against the Jews. This gives the students first hand experience in discrimination while (hopefully) not hurting anyone's feelings.

Just thought I would follow up on how I decided to handle my discrimination lesson.

I made two different handouts that were different but exactly the same in content. One had various word art and graphics which gave those students an advantage. The other paper was not copied well and free from all graphics.
The protests began right away when those students with the plain poorly copied paper saw what most of the other students were getting. Especially as I was going around and choosing which students were getting the good paper and which were not (I did this so as to try to only choose students which I thought would not become too upset).
So, now I make the two different groups seperate to different sides of the room and we begin the game. The game was a very simple straight forward quiz show game with multiple choice questions. Each team was sopposed to hold up an A, B, or C card in order to answer. No problem right? Well the discriminated against team did not have a C card to hold up so everytime C was the answer I would give the `Good` team a point.
By the end of the game (maybe 10 min) everyone was confused and a few of the students were not very happy with me. I then explained in as simple English as I could about what the game meant. Finally one of the students understood and her face lit up like a light. She then summed up the whole game in about ten seconds for the rest of the class.
I would have to say that this was a very good lesson and activity that I hope I can teach again. I think it really made the students think about the issue and just how unfair things can be.

Any thoughts??????
Muttman