International Politics in the New Century: via Simulation, Interactive Gaming, and 'Edutainment'
MIT's OpenCourseWare workshop looks at international politics through the lens of interactive tools rather than lectures alone. Students work with video and web-based games, blogs, and political simulations to test core political science concepts against real challenges of 21st-century world politics, from conflict to global governance. The course materials include a syllabus, readings, and assignments built around evaluating specific simulation and gaming tools for what they actually teach about state behavior and international relations, alongside more traditional analysis of the concepts those tools claim to model. It suits students curious about how 'edutainment' and gamified approaches can (or cannot) substitute for conventional instruction in political science, and it is delivered as free, self-paced material through MIT OpenCourseWare with no certificate attached.