Sandbox of Working Games: Constructing legal advice with LEGO®

Description

Marton Ribary (Royal Holloway) and Antony Starza-Allen (Surrey) presented the idea of a working game which experiments with playful learning and visualisation techniques to construct and conceptualise complex legal analysis for a problem question in contract law. The activity is based on the organisers’ guided approach to problem solving as an innovative and efficient way to teach the first-year core module of Contract Law with the corresponding paper "Computing Legal Analysis: A Guided Approach to Problem Solving in Contract Law" published in the Legal Education Review 33(1) (2023): 143-170.

The proposed working game focuses on the fourth stage of the five-stage approach where students construct legal advice from pre-processed and categorised informational building blocks such as concepts, rules, case law, and logical frameworks. In the proposed working game, we provide a short problem question and a set of case sheets related to the doctrine of consideration. Participants are asked to extract and colour-code the analytical building blocks, use LEGO® pieces to build a model that represents their legal advice, and share and explain their models to others. We would like to explore whether creative learning and the use of abstract visual metaphor through the use of LEGO is a suitable methodology to develop this intellectually challenging and creative part of the problem solving process, and whether such activity could be proposed as a future learning activity in Contract Law.

Period	5 Sept 2023
Event title	LEGENDFest 2023: The inaugural workshop of the Legal Educational Games: Evaluation, Network, Dissemination (LEGEND) network
Event type	Workshop
Location	Leeds, United KingdomShow on map
Degree of Recognition	National