Gaming the Future: Introducing foresight and futures skills to young people through the use of games

Teach the Future is a global organization dedicated to introducing futures thinking to young people. The field of foresight and futures studies is emerging slowly, but surely. Not only are there more organizations, conferences, journals, books and degrees than ever before, many major businesses, government agencies and NGOs are acquainted use foresight as they develop their policies and strategies.

However, all of this growth has occurred in the adult world. Unfortunately, education is one major sector that has not participated in this movement so far. The reasons are many, and a list of those reasons will be the a part of this presentation.

The major part of the presentation, however, will be to announce a strategy for penetrating the education sector using serious games. Of course, serious games for learning are not new either. In fact, thousands of games have been developed for use in schools. Yet to our knowledge, they have not been seriously tried in teaching futures thinking. Therefore, this presentation will announce one of the first major initiatives 1) to introduce existing futures games to schools, 2) to adapt adult futures games for use by young people, or perhaps even 3) to develop new futures games for them.

The outline for the presentation is as follow –
1. An introduction to Teach the Future—its mission, vision and history
2. The need for and the obstacles to introducing futures thinking in schools
3. Teach the Futures’ experience so far, limited though it be
4. The rationale for and the obstacles to learning with games
5. A catalog of existing foresight games with descriptions and strengths
6. The beginning of a discussion about what skills a futures game might teach
7. A call to continue the discussion, particularly with a network of talented young people, after thi conference

That’s a lot for 20 minutes, but each section is important for launching this initiative. Dr. Bishop and Teach the Future associates will be available