Students learned all about the Silk Road by participating in a simulation in which they role-played and interacted with one another.
To build their background knowledge, students first played a modified version of the Sharks and Minnows game. There were three Huns (sharks), and everyone else was either from the Han Dynasty or a European (minnows). Each Han person carried a cultural discovery with them such as places (i.e. Persia, Syria, India, and Rome), a fruit (i.e. grapes, figs, and pomegranates), a vegetable (i.e. alfalfa, chives, and cucumbers, and coriander), or something else (e.g. bigger horse, jewelry, pearls, ivory, and cotton. Each European carried a discovery, as well, such as roses, oranges, peaches, pears, azaleas, chrysanthemums, peonies, silk, jade, china, cast-iron, decorative boxes, and furs. The Han people and the Europeans' goal was to travel the Silk Road to exchange cultural ideas by running across the playground and avoiding being tagged by the Huns.