Steve Randles, Leader Outdoor Education, Kendal College.
“I just wanted to say a big thank you for Friday and coming in to deliver the Eco Fish game, we’ve had great feedback from the 30 students involved on how much they enjoyed it, and from my point of view great to see them developing skills across departments.
The Eco-Fish workshop helped students from Outdoor Education, Sports, Business Studies and Catering courses to work together and tackle a number of issues. Obviously at the heart of the game is Sustainability as countries (teams) have to work together as a type of UN to balance out feeding their country, other countries and leaving enough fish to continue to breed and reproduce for future generations.
The players soon found out that trying to vote on ‘rules’ or ‘quotas’ and making them enforceable is very difficult and that people don’t always act in the best public interest – especially when values are placed on the types of fish available!
The main areas of development covered were Risk, Sustainability and, surprisingly Leadership came out as a really important aspect of the learning on the day. Many students have reported that their team needed and responded to strong leaders – and often the leaders that emerged within the progress of the simulation weren’t the ones chosen by the team!
All those present found the workshop inspiring and the feedback collected on the day shows that many (52%) have learned more about risk and that 85% of respondents said that their attitude to risk has changed.
It was great being able to observe my students taking on different roles in new situations and with people they don’t know very well, if at all!
All the skills that they learned on the day will be really applicable to their course and lives – thank you so much, we loved the Eco-Fish workshop and we can’t wait to see you again!”
Steve Randles.
Twitter: @KendalOutdoors
