In the course of my undergraduate physics studies, the human element of scientific activities is taken out. As Paul Feyerabend writes in Against Method, the science textbook is a piece of propaganda, stripped of historical context. While brief historical sketches may be offered in a text, the massive body of scientific information that is expected to be consumed is extremely compressed.  The story behind it is much more complicated.  Extrapolating the increase in scientific information, just imagine the amount of processing that will be needed to be done by science students of the future. Although it is often presented as if theories became simpler by more refined thinking, it is instead an exponential increase in the number of statements expected to be assimilated by the student.

That being said, I would be interested in seeing roleplaying games used in the science classroom to encourage collaborative problem-solving. In the physics classroom, solving the problem often boils down to: how abstractly do you think?  I often am left feeling alienated in the process. Roleplaying, for me, seems like it would grant a certain amount of specificity to the thoughts and actions required in doing science.  I feel as if, instead of doing science to learn science, I am being told that I will learn science by thinking about science. Perhaps I learn better by doing. But how is habit formed other than by imitation of the species?

Below are several resources on roleplaying in education:

Educational Uses of Role-Playing Games

Why Use Roleplaying? (from Carleton College)

Role-Playing Exercises (for learning geoscience)

A paper on roleplaying in astronomy (links to pdf)

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