The Build a System Game

Field Trips for All of Us: Transformational Activities for Children and Their Adults

Note: For now, this blog is a serialization of a book titled Field Trips for All of Us: Transformative Adventures for Children and Their Adults. Here is the preface. The first field trip is Taking Education Outside.

Introduction

One of the major triumphs of modern science is the idea that we can learn a lot about any system (e.g., the solar system, a human body, a bicycle, a basketball team, a factory, a school, or an ecosystem) by looking at its parts. The process of looking at and describing things as composed of independent parts is called analysis or analytic reductionism. This way of thinking is behind the design of computer systems, other mechanical systems, advances in modern medicine from antibiotics to micro-surgery, and the structure of the social institutions of the industrial north. It is also behind ongoing climate change, ecosystem degradation, and collapse of our social systems.

The basic idea of systems thinking is that any system, in addition to being explained in terms of the behavior of its parts, can also be described in terms of how its parts are interrelated. This idea acknowledges that while the processes that can be performed by a system can be partially explained by the processes of each of its constituents, those processes also emerge from the relationships between them. Thus, systems thinking is a way of looking at things as patterns of  relationships (or interactions).

The future of humanity will be determined by the extent to which we can rethink and restructure our relationship with our global ecosystem and our agricultural, health-care, manufacturing and other human designed systems from a systems perspective.

The Build-a-System game is a fantastic and fun introduction to system thinking!

Preparation 

This activity doesn’t require any special equipment. In a variation of the game, actors can use natural props (e.g., branches, leaves, rocks) as visual aids. This game works best with four or more people. If your group is just two or three of you, consider playing The Interaction Game instead. This activity also works best with a variety of ages that includes folks eight years old or older. These older kids are more likely to be able to engage in symbolic reasoning to come up with ways that human bodies can model machine or living system parts. Younger kids gain valuable visceral knowledge of what it feels like to be part of a larger system by participating in the pretending/modeling.

Activity

A group collectively acts out a system, and one or more observers guess the system being enacted. Each group member plays the role of a part (e.g., a basket) of a machine (e.g., a washing machine or contributor to a living system).

I usually start the Build-a-System game, by asking the group if they’d like to play a game that is similar to the Interaction Game (or like Charades if you haven’t played the Interaction Game, yet), where they’ll pretend to be a kind of a system and I have to guess the system they’re pretending to be.

Then, I’ll ask the group, what comes into their mind when they hear the word system? I ask in this open-ended way rather than asking the kids to define the word system or asking what they think a system is because these questions imply I want a correct answer. In reality, I want their wonderings and reasons! Their  examples are often phrases that contain the word system such as solar system, digestive system, or computer system. 

If no one names any, I supply a few examples, like the ones mentioned above digestive system, solar system, washing machine, bicycle). Then I’ll suggest they pick out one of the examples and then  come up with something new and act it out in a way that will allow  me to guess what system they are modeling.

Giving your child(ren) freedom to choose is an important aspect of guiding this, and I would say any activity. It’s also often useful to help kids in their selection of systems to model if they struggle to come up with ideas or come up only with ideas that are very difficult to model. Offering suggestions and have fun!

After they enact each system I’ll ask: what were the parts?; what did the system do as a whole?; what relationships made the whole thing work? This last question is usually the most difficult. If children I’m working with struggle with the idea of systems being built from relationships, I ask them if the systems they enacted would work if their parts were just piled on the ground. I’ll mention that systems can do what they can do because of how they are put together;the behavior of any system is a product of relationships.

After they’ve acted out several different systems, I’ll ask them to pretend that I don’t know what a system is and to explain systems to me. If they struggle, I’ll remind them of the questions I asked: what did each system do as its “job”?; what were its parts?; what were the relationships that made the whole thing work? 

Some Nature Science

What are some differences between factories and forests?

Mechanisms are not the only things that can be described as systems. Cells, organs, organ systems, organisms, ecosystems, and the Earth as a whole are all systems.  Yet, the patterns of relationships that typify mechanisms and living systems are very different. A flow chart of a living system will be a complex web of interdependence, full of bi-directional arrows (every interaction in a living system mutually changes all participants), complex branching, and cyclic materials-pathways and feedback loops. A flow chart of any mechanism or factory system would be much simpler including fewer and typically one-directional connections, linear flows, and a neat hierarchical organization. Not only are these patterns different in kind. They also differ in how they come to be. Living systems are self-organizing, including self-regenerating and self-regulating as an aspect of self-organizing. Mechanisms are designed by humans to achieve a set of goals as simply (because simple is cheaper) as possible which is often a very linear and hierarchical pattern.

Let’s take a more detailed look at the patterns found in forests and factories. Factories are designed to produce standardized products as efficiently as possible with efficiency being measured as cost per unit. Factories are places where products are assembled from separate parts and precision is paramount. This ensures that each product is interchangeable with the next! To check this, each product is tested throughout the whole process to see that each complies with rigorous standards. Assembly lines, the mechanical centerpieces of factories, operate in a very orderly and sequential fashion. A product passes through a series of stations. Each station takes as its input the output of the previous station and passes its output to the next; very linear, very compartmentalized, very orderly. Assembly lines are composed of a limited set of machines arranged in a line connected by conveyor belts. Products flow from one station to another with one function being performed at each station. Factories are also organized to be hierarchical with sub-assemblies assembled separately and then assembled together. factory operations experts also strive to reduce complexity by simplifying human relationships and the relationships between workers and the machines they operate. They do this by establishing a simple flow of power and knowledge from the bosses and supervisor to line workers to machines. And, while humanity of course finds ways to express itself, even in factories, factory systems are designed so that those line-workers can be treated as interchangeable parts under the direction of a boss who owns their time for as long as they are at work. Rewards in the form of pay and promotion, and punishments in the form of demotion and firing, doled out via the top-down hierarchy, are used to get workers to behave and conform. Competition between workers is encouraged by promoting the best workers to higher paying jobs as supervisors. In summary, the most common patterns of relationships in factories are simple top-down hierarchies and uni-directional chains.

Forests, as a stand in for ecosystems in general,  are quite different; usually peaceful on the surface but incredibly complex underneath. They lack the sequential-orderliness-under-cacophony, possessed by assembly lines and chains of command. Anything but precise, forest cycle energy and materials with amazing efficiency. While the idea of food chains might imply a simple flow of materials from seedling to rabbit to coyote, a truer representation of the forest is an immensely intertwined and complex interdependence-web of multi-directional and often cyclical relationships. Even just considering our seedling, bunny and coyote, forest systems are vastly more complex than a linear hand-off from one station to another. Some of the oxygen so kindly freed from carbon dioxide by the seedling in the process of photosynthesis helped both the bunny and the coyote derive energy from their food up until the time when the bunny ate this little baby atmospheric carbon-scrubber/oxygenator (i.e., seedling). In return, both coyote and bunny had helped supply the seedling by supplying carbon dioxide and both may have added excrement to the soil that provided nutrients for the seedling. Heck, the bunny may have even previously eaten the seed that later sprouted the seedling and then pooped out the seed in a packet of nutrient rich feces. And that’s just the start of the list of ways those three species interact in a forest. 

Contrary to the expression, “lions are the king of the jungle,” there are no kings of the jungle, savanna nor forest. Power in ecosystems is distributed throughout the complex web of relationships including many feedback loops that coordinate the living processes of the ecosystem. As stated so beautifully by anarchist thinker and ecologist, Murray Bookchin, “There are no hierarchies in nature other than those imposed by human thought, but rather differences merely in function between and within living things.” While coyotes do eat rabbits, they don’t command them anymore than rabbits command coyotes. The relationships between these two species, of the form hunting-avoidance, take place amidst a forest of relationships: rabbits eating plants and pooping on soil; plants photosynthesizing; animals respirating; yeast and bacteria fermenting; trees calling in beneficial insects, and repelling pests via terpenes; fungi and plants exchanging nutrients via an underground mycorrhizal web; and plants calling in bacteria to fix nitrogen for them, providing nodular homes and sugar in exchange. Lots of reciprical relationships, no linear flow, no bosses. And, in the end, lions end up being consumed by soil bacteria (or is that the beginning?). So, the most common pattern of relationships in forests, other ecosystems and living systems in general is a dance of interdependence between diverse beings and between those beings and abiotic (i.e., non-living) features of their environment that includes many cyclic materials-pathways and feedback loops.

Wrap Up

Systems thinking involves looking at things in terms of wholes and relationships. It is a critical skill for the twenty-first century. The Build a system game is a great way to introduce this skill and can be played over and over again by kids of all ages.