Sustaining Our Planet for Future Generations
We value children's imaginations. We want to unleash their imaginations to save our planet.
Summary
“Imagination giving birth to evolution” Albert Einstein. We believe that children’s imagination can save our world. The children just need a place and tool to launch their ideas on environmental issues. We create a city in Minecraft to simulate the pollution problem. Children can role-play as a town mayor to keep the balance between people’s happiness and city’s pollution. This simulated city will be a new learning by doing platform that children can create and share their local problems and solutions in the future.As the first Minecraft environmental game for kids, our project gained 2,000 engagements in 1 day. Our team is so passionate about putting imagination into action.
How We Addressed This Challenge
Teaching the young generation on the inconvenience truth about the environment are crucial today. They need to know, see, and understand how to live sustainably. In order to promote the sustainability concept to children, we have developed a simulated city.
This city will be a new learning-by-doing platform for children on pollution effects. Children will learn how to manage the pollutions through role-playing as a town mayor in the game.
In other words, to score, players will have to effectively optimize between pollution and convenient living. In addition, new environmental problems can be introduced into the game engine as new lessons and hopefully new solutions will follow. Our first city was built in Minecraft, as it is one of the most popular game platforms in our targeted children segments.
We hope to build a large base of players and make a real impact in raising awareness on environmental issues. EcoKeen will educate the next generation of world citizens.
How We Developed This Project
This project inspires by one of our team members. The story starts with his special place, called Sipadan, in Malaysia. He went there every year on his birthday.
During the last few visits, as a young diver, he sees that the nature got worse and worse. Ocean life disappeared bit by bit, Trash and plastics stuck in the reefs and the reefs were not quite the same because the water got warmer. Not being able to go back to his special place again sadden him.
He doesn’t know exactly what’s going on or why the water condition suddenly changes and began his quest towards learning about the environmental issues that lead him to the sustainability concept.
He asked his friends to join and together they designed and developed a tool that would be attractive to his own generation. They called themselves Ecokeenner. Their mission is to get young kids like them to learn and be passionate about cause of actions to save the world.
We decided to build a simulated city where the town mayor has to constantly make a decision to balance between the citizen convenience and pollutions using the game logic. The city was built in Minecraft, which is one of the most popular game platforms for kids today. Using Minecraft as an engine, communication with friends around the world will be possible. Ecokeen is a Minecraft game, JAVA edition. The simulated city was built using Minecraft logics and run on Minecraft server. In this game, a kid gets to run the city. To score, the two goals (convineince and pollutions) need to be optimized effectively. The game is over when the pollution or unhappiness gets to red zone, and the Mayer gets fired!!!
In addition, the design also allow other kids around the world to enhance the game, build more cities and add more elements to the complex ecosystem. As new problems can be introduced into the game engine, solution ideas may arises from around the world!!
To promote the ideas, the team has created the “Ecokeen.world” website to introduce Ecokeen and sustainability concept. The team makes a target to reach 50,000 website visitors and 3,500 players in the first few months. Initially, a few VDOs about Ecokeen have been launched in Tiktok, Facebook, and Youtube. Without paying for adds, the VDOs received 3,000 views in 1 day.
Einstien said, “Imagination giving birth to evolution”, we hope that our creation will encourage the new generation of world citizens to think more and more about sustainability of our future.
How We Used Space Agency Data in This Project
We use photo, statistic, and information from NASA to inspire and design our game. Our website and campaign promotion use the NASA information and photo to communicate environmental issues to kids
We study information from below sources. To create the game logic; game score i.e. pollution score increase when air is polluted. The air pollution causes from the bus and factory activities. And the happiness score is increase when bus and factory is open.
https://climate.nasa.gov/
https://earthdata.nasa.gov/learn/sensing-our-planet/on-the-trail-of-global-pollution-drift
https://spaceplace.nasa.gov/greenhouse/en/
https://www.youtube.com/playlist?list=PLO0ZfOiXWrus8Jw8M1-Tb-GzruRVSliD6
https://airquality.gsfc.nasa.gov/
https://airquality.gsfc.nasa.gov/impacts
https://airquality.gsfc.nasa.gov/particulate-matter
Project Demo
Data & Resources
https://climate.nasa.gov/
https://earthdata.nasa.gov/learn/sensing-our-planet/on-the-trail-of-global-pollution-drift
https://spaceplace.nasa.gov/greenhouse/en/
https://www.youtube.com/playlist?list=PLO0ZfOiXWrus8Jw8M1-Tb-GzruRVSliD6
https://airquality.gsfc.nasa.gov/
https://airquality.gsfc.nasa.gov/impacts
https://airquality.gsfc.nasa.gov/particulate-matter