Exploring the educational use of debate games

The PhD project is a study of the educational potential of debate games in upper-secondary education. A debate game is defined by a staged conflict in a classroom setting with specific rules, roles, and relevant forms of evaluation. Based on the assumption that debate games enable students’ learning processes by supporting ideological inquiry and playful talk the project adopted a sociocultural theory perspective to analyse and understand debate games as a semiotic domain with certain practices, modalities, and distinct forms of communication.
In the empirical part of the project I co-designed an ICT supported multimodal debate game, "The power game" [Spillet om magten] and used mediated discourse analysis to study five design interventions of the game in social science classrooms in Danish upper-secondary schools. The study has helped advance theoretical and empirical understanding of ways in which debate games may offer students more granular understanding of election processes and political communication in addition to specifying guidelines for further design and use of educational games.