What is the “Great Food Transformation”, and how is it connected to helping students collaborate with each other? Can “success” — from a climate change perspective — also incorporate thinking like an Earthling, recognizing ourselves as parts of living ecosystems, thinking about which voices are missing in the conversation, practicing agency and making kin with each other, in classes and beyond?

What are parameters that can help students hold space for each other, feel encouraged to contribute and invest in shared learning?

In this year’s final collaborative exercise of Professor Sparsha Saha’s “The Great Food Transformation”, offered for the second time in the Government department (GOV 1318), we tried to grapple with some of these questions. Instead of a written in-person final exam, the teaching team worked on a format to help students revisit and engage with course content, activating soft skills and learning retention.

The 75 students in our course were divided into groups, working with the support of one external collaborator per table. Students were asked to build a game based on systems thinking or concept mapping. The game’s objective was to enable players (e.g. students that have not taken the semester-long course) to engage in an interactive, fun and collaborative way with the course content. Students could use as inspiration the components of the existing game-workshop “Food Collage”, one of many successful “serious games” workshops exploring different facets of climate change and sustainability. At the end of the 3 hours, each group recorded a video with the instructions of the game they had created.

I asked students to reflect on the experience. Here’s some of what they had to say:

“The collaborative assignment was a fun and engaging way to tie in all the concepts we learned this semester. Creating a game based on the content allowed me to really digest the content and make connections I hadn’t before.”

Han Nguyen, ‘27

“The collaborative assignment was a great culmination of this course, combining what we learned this semester and applying it to real-life events in a team setting.”

Quinlyn Long ‘26

“By building a conceptual map of our learning and explaining it, we were able to engage reflectively with the material of the course as a whole, with a deep sense of agency and engagement, consistent with the content of the course.”

Asha Kurana, ‘27

“As a visual learner, I appreciated that students were encouraged to use props and cards, and visually represent the themes discussed. I also enjoyed the gamification aspect of the assignment, which challenged my team to think about interactive ways to teach the course content to others.”

Caleb Bolden, ‘25

“I was reminded of one of my favorite mottos about learning: the value of holding high expectations in a relaxed manner. Both aiming high, and creating a psychologically safe environment for learning to take place.”

Rosa Zubizarreta-Ada

Democracy Visiting Fellow, Ash Center, HKS