Our Planet Earth

Some momentum has been building with the project recently. Firstly, several teams (loosely defined) have 'emerged'. These are what I am, for the moment, calling

• An Adminstrative Team
• An Online Research Team
• A Stakeholder Team
• A Face-to-Face Team
• A Core Research Team
• A Game Development Team

So, secondly and as the team constructions hint, we are proposing to develop a game for this project! The obvious intention is to make learning fun, motivating and relevant to the context. So, to achieve particularly the relevance, we will actually be developing a Toolkit, or the 'design of the design' for a game. This Toolkit will be named Our Planet Earth. Therefore, to help develop the Toolkit, we are hoping to explore the game design in the context of the Rift Valley in Kenya. A colleague, Dr. David Harper, has a long-standing interest in the ecology and more recently Sustainable Development of this region. I recently interviewed David and probably will do so again. David and a colleague have also produced many films of the region which he currently uses for education purposes. More of this later...

Finally, the idea of the game is to model the local systems relevant in multiple contexts (hence developing a Toolkit which can be used to 'localise' a game), particularly in Africa. Obviously there will have to be enormous limits to achieve this though and, ultimately, make the game playable. So, if you have any ideas as to what you think might make a good game for Education for Sustainable Development or have already played some of the games that exist and have thought of ways to improve them please do share your thoughts here.

As I keep emphasising, and the Toolkit name implies, there's only one way to address these problems we are all facing and that's together.