Fool the Teacher: A game to introduce kids to sensemaking
Sensemaking (or knowing how to suss out good information from bad) is one of the most important skills for kids to learn in the 2020s.
Primary school education used to be about wrenching open the spigot of knowledge and pouring facts into kids’ empty heads. But with the Internet in their pockets, kids don’t need more information, they need to know how to stay afloat amid a sea of it — and how to avoid being dragged under by the riptides of dubious reasoning and attractive conspiracy theories.
Someone tossed me my first life-raft in college. It was labeled epistemology, a word that makes me fall asleep halfway through reading it. Thankfully it’s slowly being rebranded as sensemaking, but that’s still a word used mostly by very serious adults to discuss very complicated things. It need not be.
At its core, good sensemaking has three ingredients:
Humility: Acknowledging that we start from ignorance, and that even once we’re informed about something, we may be misinformed.
Bias-awareness: Acknowledging that we are predisposed to believe things that feel true but aren’t.
Discernment: Learning methods of interrogating information, and adjusting our degree of confidence based on what we find.
Several years ago, I designed a game that introduces kids to sensemaking in a fun and engaging way. A friend tried it out with his class and they loved it. I’m open-sourcing it so others can try it, improve it, and spread it.
How to Play “Fool the Teacher”
Select a topic that you know very little about. Choose something that is pretty uncontroversial and unlikely to be awash in misinformation or varying viewpoints. Bonus points if it’s something kids will have fun researching. The mating habits of dung beetles. Whatever.
Split the students into two groups: the Teachers and the Quizzers.
Leave the room or put in noise-canceling headphones so the kids can conspire without tipping you off.
The Teachers work together to create a presentation they’ll give you about the topic, but some of the info in it (20–30%) should be false. Their goal is to fool you into believing the fake facts are real.
The Quizzers work to create questions to test your knowledge about the topic. They should coordinate with the Teachers to ensure they’ll be asking you about things that you’ve been informed/misinformed about.
When the Teachers present their lesson to you, you can take notes and ask questions. You do not have access to the Internet or books. Your goal is to model to them how someone attains truth from sources who may not be trustable, by asking tough questions and asking for sources.
When the Quizzers ask you their list of questions, your goal is not just to get the questions right, but also to model humility. You can say “I don’t know” in response to questions, or “I think the answer is X but I’m not very confident.” You get positive points for right answers, zero points for no answers, and negative points for wrong answers.
The kids can decide how they grade the quiz: that’s not important. What’s important is them having fun trying to trick you, and you modeling good sensemaking. If your sensemaking isn’t very good and you get a lot of the quiz wrong, then that shows the kids just how tough this is.
Debrief with the kids by explaining what tipped you off to information that may be false, and how your confidence level changed as you questioned them. Reinforce that all information is potentially wrong (increasingly true in the era of AI and deepfakes), and explain how you determine which sources are more trustable than others. Finally, remind them that it’s okay to be uncertain and it’s okay to be wrong. What’s most important is not getting so attached to a belief that you close your mind to new information.
In a future lesson, flip the script: let the kids know you’re going to slip some false information into a lesson and it’s their job to identify it.
I’d love to know if you end up trying this out. Please let me know in the comments, or even better, drop me a note!
