Go to mywatershed.ca to play the game and read more about it.
The Challenge
Restoration ecology courses stress that students learn both the knowledge and leadership skills
necessary to successfully restore degraded regions. Yet, traditional classrooms offer limited
opportunities to plan and implement restoration due to barriers of ecological, spatial, and
temporal scale. As we enter the UN Decade on Ecosystem Restoration (2021-2030), a top priority
is to empower future generations with the skills necessary to ensure planetary sustainability
The Solution: myWATERSHED
To train and empower youth to take on the challenge of ecological restoration and reconnect with nature in a transformational way, we created the myWATERSHED sandbox game.
myWATERSHED utilizes a digital twin of the Humber river watershed to provide learners with the opportunity to engage actively in restoration using a real-world endangered species, the redside dace. It has been designed for undergraduate students in their first or second year of study in biological or environmental sciences.
myWATERSHED allows students the freedom to explore and manipulate a realistic environment where they can assess different restoration strategies, implement different efforts under resource constraints, and solicit feedback. This system aims to have players make both micro and macro impact-based decisions that will either hurt or help the watershed and redside dace thrive. Designed to make it playable in one university class session, the game has an average playthrough time of approximately 40-60 minutes, where the timeframe inside the game is accelerated so that the players can see the impacts of their actions at a faster rate The game will end after approximately 50 in-game years of progress/impact of the water system. For replayability, each time a new play session starts, a procedurally-generated map will be produced to provide each player with a new experience.
Acknowledgements
This project is made possible with funding by the Government of Ontario and through eCampusOntario’s support of the Virtual Learning Strategy. To learn more about the Virtual Learning Strategy visit: https://vls.ecampusontario.ca.
Check out mywatershed.ca!