Designing Chill City: An interactive game supporting public learning about urban planning for extreme heat

Abstract

Climate change and the urban heat island (UHI) effect are increasing extreme heat risk in cities across the world, and have already made extreme heat the top weather-related cause of death in the United States. Despite this, understanding of viable strategies to address extreme heat is still limited, for both decision-makers and the public. Using a design-based research methodology, we developed an interactive educational game, Chill City, which teaches players about possible heat planning strategies and their tradeoffs. We surveyed adult, non-expert players to understand the game’s reception and impacts. Players expressed that they enjoyed the game and that it helped them better understand heat planning strategies and the environmental, social, and economic tradeoffs associated with them. We argue that environmental games offer educational potential for adult learners on issues of extreme heat and climate change that should be further explored to inform effective approaches and designs.

Keywords:

• design
• games
• urban planning
• urban heat island
• extreme heat
• adult learning

Acknowledgements

The authors would like to thank our amazing game and web developer Derek Lieu, Arizona Project WET for their assistance in distributing surveys, and our game player participants. We would also like to thank the two anonymous reviewers and the executive editor of JEE for their invaluable feedback.

Notes

1 The Chill City game is freely available to be played online at http://chill-city.com.

Additional information

Funding

This work was supported by a University of Arizona Office for Research, Innovation and Impact seed grant.