It is also very telling (and part of our debrief) to note when students laugh. It’s also interesting to hear the arguments the students come up, and note which students give up immediately when they read their assignment and decide that their job isn’t “good” enough. It is fascinating to watch the students work it out amongst themselves! We love this simulation for so many reasons.

Another student countered, “Not on the lifeboat!” One of our favorite funny moments occurred when someone agreed with the “senator” that he should be on the boat and another student said quietly to himself, “It depends if he is a Democrat or a Republican.” The senator claimed that he should get on the boat because he is important. Students immediately started making arguments for why they should be on the lifeboat. They had to work together to decide as a group which five people should go in the lifeboat. We then asked our students to get in a circle and told them that they were on a sinking ship, and there were only FIVE spots in the lifeboat. For each group, we started by handing out “assignments” on folded slips of paper.

We had the students in half groups (when half the class is with us and half the class is with a different teacher) so we only had 13 students at a time. Yesterday in Social Studies, we did our Sinking Ship simulation (idea credit: we first read about this here ).

Sinking ship simulator