Mikasa!

Hey everyone,

Mikasa 2 has finally been placed on the s4s website. Thanks a lot to Eddie Morrison for putting this together.

If you have any questions you could leave a comment here?

Cheers.

Come Together!

On Thursday, 7th of June a number of us involved in Science for Sustainability (s4s) came together to see how things have been going.

Actually, the 12 of us who are students at Leicester were there to see who had won the recent competition!

As previously mentioned, the competition was to:

1. Think about Sustainable Development (in Africa).
2. Model African Sustainable 'Complex Systems'.
3. Design a fun, educational game to illustrate these.

We've had Progress, Interdisciplinary Science team, Student and other smaller meetings; formal, informal, face-to-face and online. However, this was the first time that some of these different people came together!

The whole point of s4s is (to use the lingo) to form a 'community of practice' through 'participatory action research'. In other words, the aim is to invite lots of different people to become involved as a 'community'. This is never going to be easy since we're all (thankfully!) so very different! So, helping to make this work has become a big part of the project.

Given this you can see why it is so satisfying to see all of these different people sitting in the same room, discussing Sustainability and having fun!

We believe that the kinds of problems we may be trying to solve in Sustainable Development will only start to be worked towards when lots of different kinds of people are given a chance to contribute.

By-the-way, "Team Rabs" won the competition but it was very close! Everyone did really well for various reasons, which was the whole point.

All of the games will soon be played at local schools to see what the people who will really count think. The plan then is to 'bundle' everything together - learning materials, methods and competition results - for use by the African Virtual University, Open Educational Resources team in the TESSA project around Sub-Saharan Africa.

Thus, our hope is that more people can begin to come together and add their own voices to what Sustainable Development may really mean?

The Eagle Has Landed!

Rather pleasingly it looks like we have four varied student team entries for the s4s competition to develop a game for Sustainable Development.

The more I think about Sustainable Development, the more I talk to and listen to others and the more that happens on our planet earth then the more I appreciate that there's a whole range of views as to what Sustainability actually is...

I do feel that some of the views sometimes appear far from the mark, that is, so radically diverge from my own views that they can't possible be 'right'?

However, I think it would be extremely difficult to answer the question "What is Sustainable Development?" For, it seems, it is so many different things to so many different peoples. Nobody has a definitive version of the answer to this difficult question. Presumably this is because of the complexity/variation necessarily central to a consideration of this challenge?

The four competition entrants will provide us with quite a challenge, particularly given this relativistic position, when we try to decide a 'winner'.

As clichéd as this will sound they are all indeed already winners!

Cheers,

Tim :-)

May Day!

Well hopefully tomorrow - May 1st (auspicious by anyone's reckoning) - we'll be starting the s4s competition. I won't tempt fate by saying much for the moment.

Enjoy the unseasonal weather in the UK.

Tim :-)

Where Are We?

So, we should now have 5 teams of 3 people who are willing to lend a hand with the project. They will participate in the Moodle version of the competition after the Easter vacation. Again, the idea is that they'll be working in their teams to collaboratively

1. Think about what Sustainability really is
2. Begin to model the complexities of Sustainability
3. Develop a game based on the model

They will then write a short report about all their experiences which will be used by the judges to determine the 'winner'. The winner's game will hopefully then go out to local schools to see how it fares in the Real World. Finally, all the methods and learning materials will be documented for use by the African Virtual University in their TESSA project (many thanks to the TESSA team for allowing us to participate).

We'll let you know how things are progressing. Right now though we're all going to take a well-earned rest! :-)

Ready, steady...go!

We're now in the position of having a model and potential game idea which we'd like students at Leicester to test (ideally in the Physics Department but do let us know if you're interested and from elsewhere).

We've set a competition where the winners each get 100 pounds and everyone who takes part gets 50 pounds. We need 5 teams of 3 really. You can send Tim an email with the subject line 's4s competition' indicating your willingness to take part and the names and emails of your three team mates!

You may also notice we have a newsletter which we've call Mikasa where you can quickly get up-to-speed with where we are with the project.

Thanks for everyone's interest so far and best of luck with your own efforts for sustainability!

Big Chief!

Here's D and Eddie playing the s4s game 'Big Chief'. The egg boxes contain various counters such as seeds and sweets. The central box represents parameters in the environment and we each have our own box representing our village. We then work through the game rules to see how our choices, such as how much land and fertiliser to use for crops, cascade around the environment.

We had a bit of fun but since we were also working out the order of the rules and other such game mechanics it was quite tiring. We managed just three years in about an hour and a half!

Next we'll be asking students at Leicester to develop their own games, based on the videos and other learning materials. Then these games will hopefully be used in local schools.