Application Design and Engagement Strategy of a Game with a Purpose for Climate Change Awareness

Abstract

Abstract.The Climate Challenge is an online application in the tradition of games with a purpose that combines practical steps to reduce carbon footprint with predictive tasks to estimate future climate-related conditions. As part of the Collective Awareness Platform, the application aims to increase environmental literacy and motivate users to adopt more sustainable lifestyles. It has been deployed in conjunction with the Media Watch on Climate Change, a publicly available knowledge aggregator and visual analytics system for exploring environmental content from multiple online sources. This paper presents the motivation and goals of the Climate Challenge from an interdisciplinary perspective, outlines the application design including the types of tasks built into the application, discusses incentive mechanisms, and analyses the pursued user engagement strategies.

Improving Climate-Change Literacy and Science Communication Through Smart Device Apps

“…A promising pathway to encourage active engagement, particularly of younger people, in app use is to gamify them. Gamification has become an important and rapidly growing feature that may provide a huge incentive for the use of apps with an otherwise academic touch (Morford et al, 2014;Scharl et al, 2016). Another opportunity can be the dissemination of such apps with social media (e.g., Bombaci et al, 2016), and utilizing academic networks, for example sharing teaching resources with colleagues (field 6 in Figure 1).…”