The Sportsmanship Lesson, which has and will always be free, has been updated again with new diagrams and an additional game for middle school!
I had a wonderful time presenting the Sustainability Game at the 28th Annual IMC Confernce!
The more popular version of the game was an inverted form where the objective was to keep the ball on your half of the field and keep it away from your opponents. Additional descriptions suggest a line was drawn in the dirt and that the teams would endeavor to keep the ball behind their side of the line and prevent the opponents from reaching it.
One of the most beautiful things about a story is it endures. A story lives long past the person who created it. The story is like a child. It inherits the DNA of the person who created it. However, every person who tells the story afterward also imprints themselves on it. The story continues and changes just as the child grows into adulthood. However, any good story doesn’t lose its meaning or lessons taught, like any adult who still has a piece of childlike wonder and curiosity in their heart.
The rules of the game are deceptively simple. This resource acquisition game only has a couple rules, but once the students begin playing, they almost always fail collectively the first couple of times. It is not until later in the game that they realize "how to play the game" so they can still compete without completely losing the game. The game is an elegant metaphor for how humans interact with the environment, either sustainably acquiring resources or ruining it through overproduction.
Games embody the world views of their culture and transmit them to the next generations. Mancala, one of the oldest known games from Africa, has versions played worldwide. Mancala comes from the Arabic word for movement. Depending on the way society was organized changed the vocabulary for the early Mancala-style games. “Sowing” was the name given by agricultural societies. It is easy to see how gameplay resembles how seeds are planted in uniform rows. “Count and Capture” was the name from nomadic cultures, which could resemble how livestock must be accounted for every time they are moved. In Malaysia’s case, It could be argued that Mancala symbolized the maritime trade of goods exchanged from one port to another. Mancala spread worldwide through trade, warfare, religion, and immigration.
