I've been trying to finish this book "The Selfish Gene" by Richard Dawkins lately and it rekindled my thinking about the Prisoner's Dilemma. Like most teachers, the events and experiences in my own life and studies tend to inspire my classroom teaching so today, I decided to teach my kids game theory. So, I setup my Punnett square with my payoffs and told me kids a little story about two prisoners, then I gave them tokens which would declare whether they would cooperate or defect and I let them go.
I have thought a lot about the Prisoner's Dilemma both from my political science classes and my philosophy classes and I've used it to think about various situations in life but I've never actually setup or observed any experiment using it until now. I told the kids that they couldn't talk, to maintain the figurative seperation of the prisoners so they proceeded to begin under as close to real conditions as I could maintain (though some broke this rule for a purpose that will be discussed later on). At first, many students placed their chip yellow side up (to indicate cooperation) and there was some cooperation at first. Soon though, the temptation to toss a red chip (defect) became too great and many of the games went from yellow-yellow to red-yellow interspersed to finally red-red every single time. Many kids started with red-red and never once changed and one kid I walked over to simply began filling in his sheet (I asked them to do the game 30 times so it was iterated and we could tally our scores as a class) with all red-red marks since he knew that there was no way he and his partner would ever deviate from the "rational" choice.
Perhaps the most interesting thing though was two outcomes I would not necessarily have predicted. The first was that some kids willingly decided to choose their actions randomly for the simple fact that it made things more interesting to them and created some variety. An action, that in other words, is an abandonment of reason for completely emotional reasons; certainly something that is not unheard of. The second thing is that students broke the rule of silence to agree upon mutual cooperation and to thus win the game by doing what was best for themselves AND the pair, as it goes.
In the end, the game worked perfectly and I'm still deciding where to take it. Frankly, given the powerfull theoretical implications of game theory and the fact that it can be taught at a rudimentary level to young children, I'm thinking about a whole unit on this. Beyond that, I'm interested in what role I can play in manipulating the game and experimenting with outcomes within my classroom. All in all, it's an interesting thought experiment that is now existant in my class.
The reason I haven't written anything in the past couple months is that we've been preparing for the CTB-Mathematics city test. Morning school, after school, saturday school, planning and hard work in general have taken nearly all of my time for the past month but needless to say, I think it paid off and am quite certain that my students were some of the best prepared in the school for that test. I guess we'll find out in June how we did.
Also, next year, I'll be moving up with my kids to become a 6th grade math teacher and will possibly teach one 7th grade class (the worst in the school) as well. All in all, it's a mixed blessing, but the people I work with tell me that being given another homeroom and getting pushed to a higher grade is a good thing and a sign that they trust my management and skills to a certain degree.
I think I'm going to leave you with something that one of my kids wrote. This was a student who repeated the 5th grade and for the first several months of school just sat in the back of class goofing off, distracting other people and not trying to do work. Out of 50 questions on the pre-test I gave on the second day of school, he got 11 correct. Yesterday, on the post-test he got 34 correct. This is what he had to say about hsi scores:
"On the second day of school I was doing real bad. I was just not listening and sleeping in class but now I am being so good that I got a 34 out of 50. I am doing real good rite
-Mr. K