This activity uses a bag of differently-sized candies to get at the concept of bias in sampling.

... Read more about The Candy Weighing Demonstration or The Unwisdom of Crowds

Students imagine themselves to be policy advisers and write a policy memorandum on government transparency and secrecy to the imagined Transparency Reform Council.... Read more about Policy Memorandum and Government Transparency

Students conduct a mock congressional hearing on the dilemma of state secrecy and experience the challenges of policymaking.... Read more about Mock Congressional Hearing

This debate about whether judicial review is compatible with democracy is meant to get students thinking about what sort of ideal democracy is, and to see both its procedural and substantive components.

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In this assignment designed by J.M. Grenier, Students will be able to explain what is meant by a "virtual world" and the 3D web, as well as discuss the potential for the use of these tools and their impact to existing methods of communication on the web.

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Throughout the term students prepared three case studies in order to engage with information on the American legal system.

... Read more about Crime, Justice, and the American Legal System: Case Study Preparation

Benjamin Weber created an activity that spans across the entire class to help students understand the concept of “diaspora” through constant reiteration of concepts from some excerpts given to the class by the instructor. Students learned how to close-read excerpts, write reflections, and create their own ideas about the theme of the class.

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For her sixth section, Kirstin Woody Scott prepared this activity based off of the HMS/BWH case study on Bangladesh Rural Advancement Committee and tuberculosis. This activity allowed students to discuss and present the knowledge of the case they had reviewed in lecture and tackle policy realities in global health. Students prepared oral arguments to take on the role of different stakeholders and defend their positions when faced with cuts to global health funding.

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Kellie Carter Jackson, a Harvard College Fellow, created the game “Name Five” for her AAAS118 class. In the beginning of the class, she goes around the room and asks students to list five notable people of different ethnicities to help students understand the world and the power dynamics within it.

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This activity helps students read texts, analyze them, and present the information into a diagram.

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Students were asked to produce a multimedia and historical analysis of the archives of Saudi Aramco World. It aimed to bring historical and secondary sources alive by putting students directly in contact with primary, archival sources and asking them to critically engage with those materials.

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This activity created was by Benjamin Schneer, a graduate teaching fellow for GOV30, to help students understand methods in public opinion polling. Schneer provided a dilemma for students to resolve using information about public opinion polling found in their textbook or online resources. Students enthusiastically participated in this active learning exercise to incorporate classroom knowledge in a practical setting.

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In Soc 43: Social Interaction, students design and act out interactional scenes to help them understand the concepts learned that week. Generally the students are divided into pairs or groups of three for these acting "games," which vary from week to week.

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In order to get students to participate in lecture, Pardis Sabeti throws clementines to anyone who answers a question correctly or incorrectly.

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