LifeBall

Each colour pertains to a different area of social behaviour such as "thinking skills", "forward planning", "emotions" or "relationship" and presents players with a behavioural dilemma relating to that social skill.

Professionals using the game can also customise the content to only include dilemmas relating to certain contexts of behaviour such as "bullying", "offending" or "race and diversity". Each dilemma has three choices and the outcome of each choice has an effect on four "Life Indexes" - "health", "wealth", "relationships" and "self-esteem". When any life index sinks to zero that player loses a turn to recover and the winner is the first player to get all 4 indexes to teh targets set in the opening phase of the game. Just like life of course, players also have to cope random unforeseen events which also have an effect on their life indexes.

LifeBall contains 8 social skills area, 8 behavioural topic areas per skill (64 dilemmas in all) and 20 random events. All text content is spoken and included on CD in Adobe Acrobat format.

LifeBall comes in 4 versions:

LifeBall: suitable for 8-14 year olds
LifeBall Plus: with more demanding content suitable for 14+
LifeBall Special: for adults with learning disabilities
LifeBall Work: focusses on career choice and employment issues

Our learning support teacher has been trying out LIFEBALL with groups of children. She, and the children, are very enthusiastic about it. She was impressed by how thought-and-discussion provoking it was: the children enjoyed the game aspect, but they were just as keen to get stuck into a debate afterwards. She noted that the children were very interested to try out all of the possible options - to see all the consequences of their actions - which is a major success: the children are learning that they have the responsibility to themselves (and others) of taking the best decision. If only all adults could do that!

John Moar Acting Headteacher, Glaitness Primary School, Orkney