The EU migration law simulation: Enriching higher education through a gaming tool for knowledge exchange

Abstract

Developing, testing and applying an educational simulation tool preparing our students for a complex legal practice in which cooperation with European member states is essential resulted in the EU Migration Simulation. The simulation was designed to have students engage with strategies for protecting human rights, guarding national borders, or facilitating safe migration channels for a sustainable future under EU migration Law. This contribution presents the development of and working of the EU Migration Simulation as well as student evaluations from law schools across Europe, testing existing theories of educational simulation. This education project aimed to deploy a hybrid educational simulation off-line and online to offer European law and migration studies students opportunities for new forms of knowledge exchange. We found that off-line simulation was most successful for knowledge exchange and systems insight. The simulation requires a modest but well informed facilitator, which confirms existing knowledge on educational simulations. Furthermore, legal cultures had a decisive impact on the way students understood their roles, and thus in the developing of the roles during the stage of game design and testing. Moreover, we found that legal professionals were just as keen on engaging in the simulation as university students as it took them outside their professional ‘tunnel vision’ on problem solving and generating novel systems insight