The Ada Valley an Educational Simulation

The Ada Valley

The Ada Valley Project is a simulated society role-play activity that allows students to look at some of the causes that bring cultures into conflict. The groups' conflicting needs make it so that being nice to each other is not enough to get all people what they want. Negotiation is necessary. The students become members of one of the three peoples of the valley: the indigenous nomads, the steadily growing settler population who are squeezing the nomads into smaller and smaller space or the immigrants who are escaping civil war and have come in to work in the settlers' factories.

Over the course of two to three weeks, the students learn the facts about this area, create an Ada Valley identity for themselves and participate in a town meeting to discuss the needs of the people of the area. The simulation is followed by a debriefing and a final project that has students analyze the issues of the valley using mulitple intelligences. The unit works well as a lead into any book that looks at the ways groups come into conflict (Things Fall Apart, To Kill a Mockingbird, A Tale of Two Cities).