Teaching with P-Cube: Practical lessons for students and teachers

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The P-Cube game aims to help students learn about how decisions are taken in the public sphere. The challenge posed by P-Cube is to translate the complexity of public decisional arenas into synthetic and realistic cases translated into digital games. The P-Cube cases have been used among university courses during the prototype phase; students and teachers engaged with this innovative teaching tool online and in presence. The game has also been used with practitioners within and outside the public administration sector. In this article, we describe some practical applications of P-Cube; in particular, we illustrate how and under what conditions the games were used – and to what extent they reached their pedagogical aims. To this end, we identify and articulate three learning mechanisms (active learning, problem-based learning, and competition) whose predicted outcomes are in line with self-reported games’ evaluations. Finally, drawing on practical live experiences, we outline some lessons learned from the teachers’ perspective and propose practical strategies to be used to teach and assess students using P-Cube games. This article is of particular interest to those scholars and practitioners willing to engage with innovative, interactive ways of teaching public policy making. Specifically, our practical insights may be of help for developers and future users of existing digital games and inspire the development of similar digital teaching tools.