Waterlife: A game that’s fun to play and teach science and conservation concepts

[Marina Kraus]

This time, I'd like to highlight a great podcast from NOAA National Ocean Service about the WaterLife game and in general, gaming and education. This is an interview with Peg Steffen, a director of education at the National Ocean Service.
Below are some citations from the transcript and a link to the podcast:
Making Waves Episode 38: Educational Games — Oct. 28, 2009
http://oceanservice.noaa.gov/podcast.html

"...Join us for a talk with one of the key people behind WaterLife: Where the River Meets the Sea, NOAA's first major venture into the world of educational gaming. WaterLife is a 'serious game,' an increasingly popular genre aimed at meeting the needs of digital natives—children who have grown up surrounded by computers, mobile phones, and other digital technology..."

Waterlife, a game that’s fun to play, but also aims to teach young people some science and conservation concepts

"...Games like Waterlife are increasingly popular, mainly because kids really like to play games. That’s probably not an earth-shattering revelation to you, but just how much time kids spend playing games may surprise you. According to the Pew Research Center study, ninety-seven percent of teens ages 12-17 play games. A Kaiser Family Foundation study found that 8-18 year-olds are spending between half an hour to an hour and a half each day playing video games. On average, students spend about as much time each day on homework – about 50 minutes – as they do playing games.

Peg Steffen gets this. Peg is the education director for the National Ocean Service, and led the development team that created NOAA’s WaterLife game. She says that games like Waterlife are increasingly important to meet the needs of digital natives – children who have grown up surrounded by digital technology.

[PEG STEFFEN] “We’re finding that games are becoming more and more highly thought-of in the educational world as a tool to keep digital kids interested in school. Digital students now are different than they were 15 years ago. They need different kinds of methodologies, they don’t tend to want to sit and do work sheets any more. They want to be more highly engaged in collaborative activities, in group activities, in problem-solving, in meeting challenges, and especially they’re very interested in meeting some environmental challenges. And games can help fill that need.”

While educational games are all about keeping digital kids engaged, Peg said that it’s also about ensuring that kids today are able to compete and excel in the world down the road. In other words, games like WaterLife are about teaching important concepts, but they can also be powerful tools to help develop important life skills.

[PEG STEFFEN] “Those skills include things like strategic thinking, interpretive analysis, problem-solving, collaboration, critical thinking, and educational games can develop these critical skills, and help to address that pressing need for the United States to strengthen its education system and to prepare these young people for the twenty-first century jobs. Our Web site also includes a lot of additional information about careers, links to educational activities and curricula, materials about what it’s like to be a marine mammal ecologist, for example, and help students find information on the web that might lead them down the path to a science or technology career.”

That Web site that Peg just mentioned is called ‘Planet Arcade,’ and it’s at games.noaa.gov. The flagship game on this site is WaterLife, but it’s not the only offering kids will find there.

[PEG STEFFEN] “Games.noaa.gov is a website that we hope that children will visit regularly to understand more environmental issues, and so we have populated it with a number of games that we’ve produced including our signature game, which is Water Life, Where the River Meets the Sea. But then we have also done some mini-games taken from some of our other offerings and put that on the website in addition to adding links to other games from other federal agencies and partners that have things that will help students understand environmental issues like beach clean-up, whale migration, ocean challenge puzzles, and some other things. So we’ve featured some things from the EPA, from National Geographic, from National Marine Sanctuaries, from Ocean Explorer. So there are a number of highlighted games, but we call it Planet Arcade because it does have an environmental twist to it. So we hope students will know that games.noaa.gov is the place to go for fun things about the environment. And it’s getting a lot of traffic.”

When NOAA began the foray into gaming with the WaterLife game a year and a half ago, the first challenge was to come up with a good topic. Peg said it was clear from the start that it needed to be something with a lot of rich content, and it needed to be a topic that tapped into the expertise of NOAA people. After a lot of brainstorming, the team decided to focus on estuaries.

[PEG STEFFEN] “I think because there were a lot, a lot of complex, biological content issues and things that are already found within teachers’ curricula and within the science standards in quite a few coastal states, and we thought this game would be something not only fun for students but useful in the classroom too. So we thought that this had the opportunities for understanding water systems, and ecological food webs, and understanding issues of pollution, uh, looking at marine debris, looking at some really fun critters, and those kind of things, all wrapped up into a really nice package.” ..."