Games to teach sustainability

Players can partake in various missions involving producing renewable energy to counteract pollution by visiting three locations: Wind Island, Hydro Mission, or Solar Mesa. This game is definitely engaging and offers a teacher resource section with suggestions on how to incorporate the game into a lesson plan.

The Mac version is only available in a single player mode at this time, but I am sure your students will be just as engaged!

If you are looking for an interactive way for students to actually make decisions around sustainability, check out MySustHouse Games. This series offers three separate games or scenarios in which students can help create their own sustainable feature. The Environment Game for ages 9 and older , the Building Game for ages 12 and older , and the Town Game for ages all offer unique opportunities for students to engage in critical thinking around issues of development and sustainability.

The creators do a great job with their teacher resource section and the short video commentary alone will have your students buzzing, as many of them have probably never heard a Scottish accent. Family Reunions. Pet Vacations. Family Day Outing. Corporate Day Outing. Senior Citizens Outing. So, here are some activities that can help children learn about sustainability: Segregating and Recycling.

Picking up trash. Plant Trees or build an Organic Garden. Reuse Used Items for Art and Crafts. Encourage Outdoor Activities. Collect Rainwater and Save Water. Encourage to read books about nature and earth. Homemade Paper. Construct a Compost Bottle. When adding eco-friendly activities to your team building, it is essential to create sustainability awareness in parallel.

Without this, the eco-friendly activities may as well be meaningless. Below is a list of activities and ideas you can use to increase awareness. A lot of waste is derived from workplace eating habits.

Employees love to order take-out and purchase instant microwavable meals, only to throw away the boxes and containers the food came in. You can teach employees about this waste and share ideas with them on how they can combat it. After sharing the amount of waste collected from a weeks worth of eating, you can start an initiative for employees to bring their own food to work, thus, minimizing food container waste.

Unfortunately, the amount of resources needed to grow meat is incredibly harmful to the environment. To fight this, support a single day of the week where employees are urged to try meatless alternative options for their lunch.

CSA groups bring local food producers together with consumers. These groups help introduce local companies with local consumers in an effort to provide directly to consumer farmed products as well as eco-friendly practices. Working outside can boost productivity and encourage individuals to connect with nature. An outdoor working environment lets your employees share in your love for nature.

Energy audits identify how much energy your building is using. After conducting one of these audits, most auditors will share ideas on how you can improve your companies energy use. Be sure to share these results with your employees to help them understand how their actions in the office affect the environment. Offices love to keep the lights on, by sharing the importance of sustainability with your employees, everyone can work together to share in the effort.

When rooms are not in use, turn off the lights. A large number of games still have mindless destruction as their primary aim: immensely popular 4X games invite players to eXplore, eXpand, eXploit, and eXterminate. It looks like change will not happen in one day and that is why we need more games specifically dedicated to teaching gamers about sustainability.

A classic source for this is Systems Thinking Playbook from the s created by educator Linda Booth Sweeney and sustainability advocate Donella Meadows. The book features a number of both small and advanced games to promote sustainable thinking. Among the most prominent examples is Harvest , which leads you through the depletion of the ocean from unsustainable competition the tragedy of commons and helps you to learn ways to avoid it.

Building on innovation theory, the game helps players learn how to spread positive changes in society through simulating the diffusion of ideas in an environment of change agents, laggards, mainstreamers, and iconoclasts, each with their unique attitudes and ambitions.

Sustainability games have also been evolving. From online Green Business simulators to Nature Cards teaching biomimicry and inspiring creative thinking, games promoting sustainability have actively populated both virtual and real worlds.

The most recent applications include a playful environmental science textbook that lets you interactively explore different layers of life on Earth and the World Climate negotiations simulation, which shows that the only way we can tackle climate change is through collaboration. Other games deal with survival in the wild and city building: they often shift the focus from individual survival and prosperity to the life on the planet as a whole.