Digital natives are young people born after 1980 when social technologies went online. They speak the digital language fluently. Serious games such as PeaceMaker have the goal – beyond providing fun and entertainment – to motivate young people to learn about sociopolitical issues. In PeaceMaker the player assumes the role of the Israeli Prime Minister or the role of the Palestinian President and takes various decisions with the aim of satisfying both sides of the conflict. The player has to deal with different events coming up in the conflict by selecting actions in different categories such as security, diplomacy, and construction in order to resolve the conflict in the game.
In the lecture, Kampf will present a series of studies conducted with undergraduate students from Israel, Palestine, Turkey and the US (i.e. the first generation of digital natives or Generation Y) examining the game performance and the acquisition of knowledge about the conflict and how to develop different perspectives regarding the situation.
Dr. Ronit Kampf received her PhD in political communication from the Hebrew University of Jerusalem. She is a lecturer in the Department of Communication and the Program in Research of Child and Youth Culture at Tel Aviv University. She studies serious games and learning particularly in the context of the Israeli-Palestinian conflict. She is writing a book about her work with computerized simulations of the Israeli-Palestinian conflict supposed to be published at the end of 2017 by Yale University Press. Her studies have been conducted in cross-national contexts including Israel, Palestine, Turkey, the USA, Guatemala, and Brazil.
If you are interested to take the digital native quiz: http://pewresearch.org/millennials/quiz/intro.php
The PeaceMaker Game:
www.peacemakergame.com
Lecture in cooperation with the University of Graz.
