These are some of the best classroom-friendly games for improving students' decision-making and problem-solving skills. Decision-making is at the foundation of social and emotional learning and is key to success in school and life. These games build students' decision-making skills by placing them in a variety of interesting and difficult scenarios that get them thinking through choices, seeing the consequences, and learning management and responsibility. They'll be navigating political dilemmas, selecting between various ethical arguments, and even making strategic city- and world-building choices. Best of all: The games on this list are so absorbing, that students won't even realize they're brain boosters!
Here are some games to help incorporate decision-making into your daily routine.
1. The Oregon Trail
Kids lead their families westward across the American frontier by tapping the screen to make choices about the journey. Text tips and hints help kids make informed decisions and prepare for unexpected events such as a sick family member or a broken wagon. They'll make decisions about purchasing provisions, how fast to travel, when to take a rest, and which routes to take. A set of mini-games breaks up the somewhat repetitive gameplay with fairly easy challenges to increase food or supplies.
Devices: iOS, Android
2. Quandary
Quandary is a free, non-profit interactive learning game in ethical decision-making. Quandary engages students in ethical decision-making and develops skills that help them identify and resolve ethical issues in their own lives through an engaging story and fun gameplay.
Players develop skills such as critical thinking, perspective-taking and decision-making. Quandary provides a framework for how to approach ethical decision-making without telling players what to think.
Devices: Web
3. Hall of Heroes
Hall of Heroes is an online game to empower students in the transition to middle school by strengthening social and emotional skills. Character skills such as compassion, gratitude, self-control, empathy, humility, teamwork, collaboration, and communication are built into each level and most interactions, which makes this web-based game a wonderful tool for learning.
Devices: Web
4. Community in Crisis
Community in Crisis is a point-and-click, story-based literacy game where students take on the role of director of a community center dealing with the aftermath of a hurricane. Students will need to weigh decisions based on facts and do plenty of textual analysis to aid their decision-making.
Devices: Web
5. iCivics
iCivics describes itself as the nation’s most comprehensive, standards-aligned civics curriculum freely available on the Internet. You can use a decision support tool for guidance in making choices.
Devices: iOS, Android
6. Think Like Churchill
Think Like Churchill lets kids experience some of Winston Churchill's most pivotal decisions, both personal and political. Within the framework of a graphic novel, kids navigate animated scenarios, read primary-source documents, and make decisions in actual circumstances Churchill encountered. Then they get to see Churchill's decision and measure their criteria against his.
Devices: iOS
7. Life Choices
Life Choices is a life simulation game that requires you to make choices. This fun, interactive game app is worth trying for it is loaded with surprises. Choose from over 500 choices to shape your characters and determine their fates.
Life Choices game app is set in a town named Unicoville. The town needs your help with repairs and restoration. You will have to bring new people to this town, simulate their lives, and complete goals. Your objective is to make the town reborn.
Your intelligence and decision-making skills play a big role here. Each choice comes with consequences as it can change the outcome. Will you become a mindless brute? Or will you be someone perfect? The choice is in your hand.
Devices: iOS, Android
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