Friday, January 4, 2013

Playing out future flooding scenarios

Sandor Gyarmati in the Delta Optimist (British Columbia): A new video game being developed at UBC will give Delta students the chance to become city planners dealing with the implications of global warming and a rising sea level.

Future Delta 2.0 is a video game project led by Dr. Stephen Sheppard at UBC and Dr. Aleksandra Dulic of UBC-Okanagan. Having elements similar the interactive city-building game Sim City, the game will enable players to become city planners dealing with the implications of global warming and sea level rise.

"The video game is initially, at least, for high school kids," said Sheppard, director of UBC's Collaborative for Advanced Landscape Planning (CALP). "Working with some schools in Delta, it's very early in the life of this project. We were funded to work on a climate change video game that was to be a place-based game in Delta, so Delta people and Delta school kids would play the game and they would see places they know and recognize.

"It would also deal with other kinds of issues, including sea level rise and its effects on farming, and also how people respond in terms of community energy and renewable energy, cutting their carbon footprints and what their community would look like. It's to be a fun game that's educational for students who are studying climate change in their curriculum and in sciences classes. It would make it meaningful for them but also fun," he explained....

A blue heron in Vancouver, shot by Eugene Sit, Wikimedia Commons via Flickr, under the Creative Commons Attribution-Share Alike 2.0 Generic license

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