Climate Connections

Read more about the project here.

I worked on this as an Independent Study Project (Spring and Summer 2008) at WPI.

The project was sponsored by US FIRST, with the intent to distribute it for the FIRST Lego League robotics competition. Climate Connections, named for the theme of the 2009 competition season, is a card game designed to teach middle-school students about issues concerning climate change.

Players take on certain roles (such as Real Estate Developer or Environmentalist) and act as a leader of a region of the world. They need to build Power Plants to sustain their population of Citizens, and vote on Policies which affect gameplay. But their actions cause an impact on the environment, which could lead to catastrophic Events (e.g. Smog, Erosion, or Drought).

The game was created both as a physical card game and a computer game - written in Java, utilizing Java Monkey Engine. I was heavily involved in game design and testing, and co-developed the code for the computer game.

Unfortunately, while the physical card game is pretty much finalized, the computer game still needs a lot of further development, and our time and resources were drained. We are investigating some kind of print-on-demand option for the physical card game.