MAKE-A-COP
Psychology and Law · York University
Design a police service.
Explain your decisions.
Build a police service over three classes
MAKE-A-COP is a roleplaying, game-based learning activity in PSYC 3310. Across three classes, students work in teams to create a fictional Canadian police service, choose its identity and priorities, and make decisions together. The service becomes the team’s shared “character”: its choices reflect what the group values and how it uses limited resources.
In each class, students use readings and lectures to make a team decision and explain it to others. Discussion and feedback give them a chance to reconsider their choices. Roles rotate so that students can contribute in different ways. No previous roleplaying experience is needed.
Inside the experience
Create your service
Choose a name and identity, establish how your team will work, and decide where to invest limited resources. Priorities include community partnerships, training, tactical response, equity, oversight, and technology.
Make the case
Use course concepts to decide how your service should respond to an unfolding challenge. Explain the evidence behind your choice, then compare it with other teams’ decisions through class discussion and polling.
Reconsider and learn
Use feedback and debriefing to examine what shaped your decisions. Consider what those choices mean for your service’s accountability and its relationship with the community.
Why roleplay?
Roleplaying games as educational experiences
In a roleplaying game, participants make decisions as a character within a shared story. The facilitator describes the situation and what follows from those choices. Dungeons & Dragons is a familiar example. In a classroom, this structure can give students a problem to work through with other people and a reason to explain their thinking. Shoenberger’s review of tabletop roleplaying in higher education (2024) describes these opportunities alongside challenges such as unfamiliar rules, cognitive load, and the demands on the instructor.
In MAKE-A-COP, the shared character is a police service. I facilitate the activity as teams use course evidence to choose a response. Class polling makes differences between teams visible, and debriefing returns the discussion to the evidence and assumptions behind those choices. Students then identify what they would approach differently in a future decision.
The educational value depends on how the activity is designed. A systematic review of analog game-based learning by Sousa and colleagues (2023) found promising cognitive, psychological, and social outcomes across varied games, while highlighting the importance of alignment with learning goals and attention to accessibility and inclusion. That broader evidence does not establish the effectiveness of any single activity. In this course, the discussion after a decision is part of the activity: it connects the game with research on policing and public trust.
The psychology behind the decisions
MAKE-A-COP connects research on recruitment and police decision-making with interviewing and memory. Teams consider what that research supports and how their recommendations may affect public trust.
Students are asked to explain uncertainty in their recommendations and work through disagreement within the team.
The police services are fictional and the activity deliberately simplifies complex issues. Its purpose is to support inquiry and discussion about psychology and law.
Meet the teams
Each class brings its own imagination to MAKE-A-COP. These AI-generated illustrations were created for previous teams’ fictional police services. They depict imagined characters and services, rather than photographs of students or real police organizations.
Winter 2026
PSYC 3310 N · Psychology and Law
Fall 2025
PSYC 3310 B · Psychology and Law
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