Zendo, also known as 'Science: the game,' ...
Excellent suggestion, thank you! And with a bit of looking, I actually found an essay by someone who uses Zendo to teach the scientific method. I incorporated your suggestion, as well as a brief excerpt from his essay:
...Zendo, also known as ‘Science, the game’, involves one player picking rules and creating structures that follow that rule. The other players try to discover the rule by building their own structures and asking whether those structures follow the rule. See Wikipedia for the exact rules.
Traditionally, the names of these roles are ‘Master’ and
The current version of the How to Run a Successful Less Wrong Meetup booklet contains descriptions about various games and activities. The problem is, some of these descriptions are quite short and don't really inspire people to try them out. I've been asked to make those descriptions sound like more fun, but for some reason I have difficulty doing so. At first, I thought it was just because I hadn't tried most of those exercises myself, and it felt dishonest to try to make something sound fun if I didn't know to what extent it actually was fun. But then I realized that I also couldn't come up with anything good for Zendo, which is a game that I've played and which I've liked. So I'm kinda stumped as to what the reason is.
But if you can't solve a problem, outsource it! I'm posting some excerpts from the most boring-sounding activities in the comments below, and I'd like people to reply to those comments and come up with exciting-sounding descriptions for them. Something in the style of the Biased Pandemic writeup (which I quoted liberally in the booklet) might be ideal, but other styles are cool, too.
Thanks in advance!