Role-playing planning games as educational tool: Experiences of teaching with educational games in Sweden

Abstract

Teaching about cities and planning involves complexities of understanding urban development in space and time, evolution and transformation of cities, urban politics, actors and stakeholders. Delivering efficient ways of teaching, is very important for educators, particularly among lecturers at universities who work with urban planning and design. Games can be used as educational tools and role-playing games can capture the political struggle of different actors and stakeholders involved in planning processes. Games can enable students to experience urban development and take roles of different actors and stakeholders in the planning and development processes and practice the art of negotiations in urban politics. Two educational games were written for the planning courses at KTH Royal Institute of Technology, Sweden. Since 2011, 17 games were played in different courses. Data from the evaluation forms was collected on 14 games and 277 students answered questions. This paper analyses the evaluation forms and the comments of the students who took part in the games and discusses gaming as an educational tool. The experiences with role-playing planning games are very positive. These ratings occurs consistently in each game that was played with very small variations.