The Emoticon Game

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Area: Literature/Language Arts, Other Areas
Grade Level: Middle School
Topics: Communication, Language, self awareness
Estimated Time Necessary: One Hour

Lesson Plan

Objectives:
To encourage reasoning skills and build up self-awareness
Using emoticons for expressing our emotions is a common phenomenon nowadays. This activity deals with using the focus on emoticons as a way of engaging in a philosophical reasoning process. 

Materials needed: Pictures of WhatsApp or other sets of emoticons. 

Description: Students will be presented with a situation where they have to select three emoticons that would most likely be their reactions to a given situation. They now have to finalize one emoticon out of the three narrowed down; while doing so, they have to give reasons for selecting one and rejecting the other two (and when can the other two be used). The facilitator can start with situations where different reactions are possible and gradually take examples of situations where similar reactions can be anticipated. This increases the difficulty level of the activity as they now have to reason for the subtler differences and choices. The facilitator can also help them discover their underlying assumptions and give directions to improve their thinking. This activity also helps them introspect on themselves, leading to better self-awareness. 

Difficulty level: Simple

Difficulty level: Moderate/advance (since the emoticons are similar to each other)

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This lesson plan was created for PLATO by: Aaditya Vijay Jadhav, Assistant Professor of Philosophy, Ramnarain Ruia Autonomous College, India.

This work is licensed under CC BY-NC-ND 4.0

If you would like to change or adapt any of PLATO's work for public use, please feel free to contact us for permission at info@plato-philosophy.org.