Drain or Sustain
Who it is for
Senior Secondary
What you need
Tokens: stones, leaves, bits of coloured paper, chalk, or counters from a board game. A coin to toss.
What it is for
To show how the way one person thinks about a shared resource decides whether they — and everyone around them — get through a shortage.
The manual states these. What it does not state is not here.
How it runs
The teaching sequence as the manual gives it.
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01
At least two groups play, with four or five people in each. Each group starts with 20 tokens in a common pile. There are two rules. -
02
Every round, each person must take at least one token to survive. There is no upper limit on how many they may take. -
03
Nobody may talk to anyone else. Each person plays for themselves. Once everyone has taken from the opening pile of 20, count what is left and toss the coin. HEADS: double what is left. TAILS: add only half of what is left. An example. Four players take from the pile of 20 and 5 tokens remain. The toss comes up TAILS, so the pile should get half of 5, which is 2.5 — and since there are no half tokens, it gets 2. The next round starts with 7. Had the toss come up HEADS, the pile would have got another 5 and the next round would have started with 10. The players take again, the coin is tossed again, and the pile is topped up the same way for the third round. Play three or four rounds, depending on the time you have. Anyone who reaches a round with no tokens left to take is out. If a group's pile is empty after a round, the whole group is out. -
04
The groups can all play at once, side by side. If they do, each group needs a monitor to check the rules are followed, toss the coin and top up the pile. Otherwise send everyone out of the room and bring the groups in one at a time. Every group plays the same number of rounds unless it is knocked out first. Once a group has played, its members may stay and watch the next one — in silence. A note for the facilitator: tell the players only what to do. Do not tell them what counts as winning. Let them decide that for themselves, and then notice what they assumed. With more than two or three groups, give each one a note-taker to record how many tokens each person took in each round.
Talking about it
Discussion points, worked examples and the handouts the manual prints with this session.
Points for discussion
Ask players how they decided how many tokens to take each round. With a small group, get every person to account for their own play. With a large one, a few honest accounts are enough to start it off.
Now tell them what the tokens were. The pile is a renewable resource — a well, a forest, a fishery, a grazing common. One token a round is what one person needs to survive, and a round is a year, or a generation. The coin is climate change: the resource was meant to double, and sometimes it manages only half. The group is a community, and the silence is what a community looks like when every member is only looking after themselves. Then put the obvious question: what would have happened if you had been allowed to talk? To make that point properly, run the game three ways. First group: no communication at all. Second group: allowed to discuss and agree a plan before each round. Third group: a leader is appointed who tells everyone what to do, with no other discussion — though individual players may ignore the leader. Give one group a male leader and one a female leader, and see whether anything changes. The game works without naming the resource, but the discussion sharpens considerably if you do name it: this town's water, this village's grazing, this coast's fish.
Where this comes from
Bridge the Gap is a compilation. This is what the manual records for this session.
Page 4-7 https://inecc.net/wp/wp-content/uploads/2020/05/Trainers-Manual-on-Games-and-Activi ties-SDG-CC.pdf
Before you start sets out where the compendium as a whole comes from.
Next
Where to go from here.
Next session
Building Climate Resilience - SDG 13 (Climate Action)Sustainable Development, 8 of 11The theme
Sustainable Development11 sessions and the background readingAll eight themes
Teach43 sessions across 8 themesUnderstand the data
- How to read environmental dataSeven questions that catch most of the ways a true number becomes a false claim.
- Measured or modelled?The first question to ask of any environmental number, and the one most often skipped.
- What is a reporting floor?When an instrument returns its own lowest value, that is not a measurement of nothing.