Card game on trade and political systems

“Card game on trade and political systems” was a session of Horacio Diez’s History class in 3rd year of ESO, in March 2021.

In a playful way, with a card game, we work as a group to meet some of these objectives:

Distinguish

• Public and private
• Political and economical

Introduce concepts:

•  Democracy, aristocracy and monarchy
• Levels of government

Due to the richness of the dynamics and the variety of options and resources that it has, it can be done in several sessions, although we decided to make a short version of 50 minutes between approach, content and conclusions.

The game mechanism is as follows:

Groups of 6 students are formed, who place the tables in a block for each group, so that they can negotiate cards. You can also play the game standing up, in an open space.

• The objective of the game is to increase the level of points by trading cards.
• Another objective of the game is to increase the group’s point level, which will require different strategies.
• At the time when political systems are added, groups have restrictions on how they change their cards.

With the tables in the spreadsheet, a bar graph is made, with a trend line, in which we see by rounds who are the ones with the most and who have the least.

The graph can be commented round after round, seeing how the groups change. Normally the graph shifts to the right, inequalities also increase.

This graph, which has come out experimentally in class, we compared it with the one represented by the Gapminder website, on wealth in countries over time. It is surprising to see that it is very similar. Another conclusion was that countries have grown in wealth in the last 500 years, but also in inequality between the richest and the poorest.