Harvard students see natural disaster from three sides
It took less than 90 minutes before students in Miaki Ishii’s first-year seminar started to talk openly about revolt. The unrest, however, wasn’t due to any political issue currently making headlines, but to a small room in Harvard’s Geological Museum and a handful of their classmates. As part of the class “GeoSciFi Movies: Real vs. Fiction,” students took part in a role-playing game that saw them acting as citizens of the island of Montserrat, the tiny country’s government, and a group of scientists monitoring the island’s volcano. Over the game’s five 15-minute rounds, each group requested funding for various projects — a new water treatment plant for the community, volcano monitoring instruments for scientists, or new ambulances for the hospital — which had to be balanced against the government’s limited budget. Complicating matters, the island also faced devastating natural disasters over the course of the game, including a powerful hurricane and a massive...