Embedding a Climate Change videogame in High Schools: Towards a Teacher’s Guide for Engaging Students with a Place-based Videogame Future Delta 2.0

At the moment, BC has no comprehensive climate change curriculum in high schools, and educators lack coordinated materials to support its teaching. In an effort to narrow this gap, the Collaborative for Advanced Landscape Planning (CALP) at the Faculty of Forestry, UBC partnered with the Delta School District, to develop an educational and compelling videogame Future Delta 2.0 (FD2), which brings together methods from commercial gaming a participatory research to address climate change science in an innovative place-based game environment. The game has been co-designed and evaluated with students & teachers from the Delta School District, as a proof-of-concept learning tool to explore how virtual future scenarios in the students own neighbourhoods may motivate interest, awareness, learning and in some cases behaviour change and civic engagement. CALP now proposes to turn the FD2 videogame, currently an experimental research product, into a comprehensive, stand-alone teaching and educational resource on climate change Future Delta Teachers Guide. The Guide will provide a handbook on climate change education, for wider use in the Delta School District, using a community place-based videogame as an interdisciplinary resource to make climate change teaching/learning engaging and fun.

Faculty Supervisor:

Stephen Sheppard

Student:

Emme Lee

Partner:

Telus

Discipline:

Urban studies

Sector:

Information and communications technologies

University:

University of British Columbia