Defining an Energy Policy: A Game for Thinking

This workshop, developed and conducted by the Università della Svizzera italiana’s (Lugano), takes the form of a 10-15 minutes game. It aims at raising the participants’ awareness about the impact of the use of certain energy sources on the environment and on every day life. It also teaches the players that receiving more accurate information about a given problem (here energy production) can impact one’s decisions.

Each participant slips into the shoes of the ruler of an imaginary country, and decide how much electricity to produce with each of the available generation technologies. There are six technologies to choose from, identified by the primary energy source: sun, wind, hydroelectric energy, natural gas, coal, and nuclear energy. The aim of this four-staged game is to demonstrate that comparing one’s decisions to others’ and learning about energy impacts one’s choices about it.