Expedition Sea Level - a numerical interactive activity to better understand sea-level rise

Expedition Sea Level is a digital interactive activity designed as a game for middle school students (11 to 15 years old) to learn about the links between sea-level rise, glacier and ice sheet melting, and human activities. This game is the result of Clémence Foucher’s diploma project conducted within the framework of the European research project PROTECT.

It includes various concepts to understand :
– Why sea level changes
– How ice sheets and glaciers evolve and are studied
– The idea that the future is not yet written
– The concepts of mitigation and adaptation to climate change

Play !

This activity can be explored in groups or individually, in class or during class visits where students meet the actors and actresses of science. Another goal is to create discussions and debates among students on various topics related to climate change, but also to help them understand the scientific processes behind the different ongoing or upcoming changes, in order to combat increasing eco-anxiety.

A game in 3 chapters

To achieve this, a fictional narrative is broken down into three chapters with increasing immersion for the audience. The first one is a short animation featuring a young Maldivian girl in 2081, visiting her grandparents whose house is partially underwater. The second one is designed as a first-person shooter game where the audience plays a glaciologist at Dumont d’Urville and on the Astrolabe glacier, answering pedagogical quizzes and learning through mini-games. And the last one is shaped as a multiple-choice tree game, leading to three IPCC scenarios (low, intermediate, and high). The choices made by the players lead to one of the three scenarios in which the audience must find the best adaptation plan to protect the grandparents from the first chapter.

A guide for teachers

The game is accompanied by a teaching guide for teachers to facilitate a teaching sequence of about 3 hours, with the possibility of conducting the activities over several sessions or only doing certain parts depending on the teaching objectives.

Contact

PROTECT
Link to the game : https://view.genial.ly/66179c821af69600147e2eef

This fully illustrated project meets the communication needs of PROTECT but also the understanding and entertainment expectations of middle school students, based on an anonymous survey conducted among 71 middle school students in mainland France from December 2021 to February 2022. This project has received funding from the European Union’s Horizon 2020 research and innovation programme under grant agreement No 869304. This material reflects only the author’s view and the European Commission is not responsible for any use that may be made of the information it contains.