Meeting of Perspectives

Aims of the tool

The overall goal of the simulation is to provide participants with a greater understanding of community-level political processes and to help develop their skills to live and work effectively as community members. The game is designed to be useful in the education both of Moldovan youth and international workers who lack previous experience in Moldova or the post-Soviet space.

Description of the tool

These Simulation Games is the result of the conference "Simulation Games for Teaching Human Rights and Active Citizenship in Post-Soviet Moldova", in Repblic of Moldova, in March 2012, involving 24 participants from different countries.

This is a fictitious simulation set in the context of a Moldovan community trying to reach agreement on a small project. Such a setting naturally includes multiple opinions, agendas, and project ideas. These project ideas are based on actual community proposals from Moldova. While the people are fictitious, their cultural beliefs, traditions, relationships and attitudes are based on reality.

The overall goal of the simulation is to provide participants with a greater understanding of community-level political processes and to help develop their skills to live and work effectively as community members. The game is designed to be useful in the education both of Moldovan youth and international workers who lack previous experience in Moldova or the post-Soviet space.

By the end of this simulation activity, participants will:
1. Demonstrate increased appreciation for and sensitivity to the dynamics of a Moldovan community, with specific attention to the role of different social groups (ethnic, linguistic, religious, and gender);
2. Analyze local resources and needs (human and physical) that enable or impede community action;
3. Moderate communication and negotiate compromise more effectively in situations of strongly divergent opinions;
4. Communicate persuasively with regards to community actors in order to motivate community members, and facilitate community action;
5. Examine specific social legacies of communism as they pertain to community action (unwillingness to volunteer, expectation for public entities to resolve problems for citizens, passive citizens, lack of trust in formal processes, corruption, and misunderstanding of civil society’s role).

These are the basic learning objectives for which this simulation is designed. A variety of additional objectives can be added without altering the content of the simulation in order to suit the educational needs of the context.