To increase the engagement of the students and to explore alternative teaching activities, a didactical experiment was carried out at the University of Firenze (Italy): the teaching course “Basic elements of geomorphology” was reorganized to include relevant elements of gamification. The main one was a competition among the students based on a serial quiz game, which was carried out at the end of each lesson. This activity was called “Who wants to be a geomorphologist?”, clearly paraphrasing a notorious TV show. The students used their mobile device to access a series of quizzes, previously prepared by the teacher to test the reasoning skills of the students, their ability to make connections between distinct topics, and their capability to enter in a “geomorphological state of mind”. Each participant scored some points based on the answers provided and a general ranking was updated after each lesson. The prize (a “bonus” during the final examination for the top three students) was very attractive for the students, which demonstrated a strong engagement and a positive attitude towards the gaming activity. In turn, the activity was an effective didactical tool as allowed the students to better focus on some key concepts delivered by the teacher.

How to cite: Segoni, S.: Gamification of a “geomorphology” bachelor’s degree course, EGU General Assembly 2023, Vienna, Austria, 23–28 Apr 2023, EGU23-3948, https://doi.org/10.5194/egusphere-egu23-3948, 2023.

Save the glaciers! is an educational escape kit designed for teenagers (11-18 years old) to learn what glaciers are, how they move, how they react to climate change and what people can do to slow down their melt.

We made two versions of the game: a physical version and an online version. In both versions players have to sequentially solve 4 enigmas to unlock the next enigma until they reach the end of the game. Each enigma is designed to make the player discover and understand the following processes:

• Melting of mountains glaciers contributes to sea level rise

• Anatomy and mass-balance of a mountain glacier: What is it made of? How does it form? How does it grow and shrink?

• Glacier sliding: glaciers are not static, they slowly slide under their own weight

• Mountain glaciers are losing mass all around the world due to climate change, which can be observed by looking at their retreating termini.

The physical version is designed to be played by 5 people; the online version can be played alone. Three levels of difficulty have been designed for the physical game: secondary-school pupils, high-school pupils and university students. In total more than 200 people have played the game, across both the physical and online versions.

The game has been developed as a collaboration between the H2020 project PROTECT and a team at the Institute of Environmental Geosciences.

How to cite: Chapuis, A., Burgard, C., Ducasse, E., Cook, S., Gauthier, L., Garcia Molina, C., Bataille, A., and Durand, G.: Save the glaciers! An educational escape kit, EGU General Assembly 2023, Vienna, Austria, 23–28 Apr 2023, EGU23-7146, https://doi.org/10.5194/egusphere-egu23-7146, 2023.

Geoeducation involving people of all ages and societal groups represents an important foundation for building more sustainable societies, including a better awareness of hazardous processes such as landslides and related geomorphic phenomena. In the 21st Century, geoeducation stands in tough competition with a multitude of other pieces of information received by post-modern humans. To ensure that messages are appropriately received and remembered, geoeducational resources have to be funny and impressive. As immersive virtual reality (VR) experiences are supportive to this aim and are becoming more broadly affordable, we apply this technique and develop a set of landslide-related geo-gaming applications, which will be installed at the visitor centres of the three Austrian UNESCO Global Geoparks (UGGps), and freely available to all those who have the necessary VR equipment.

We present a first proof-of-concept study for the prehistoric Wildalpen Rock Avalanche, which occurred sometimes between 5900 to 5700 a BP during the autumn or winter period and displaced a rock mass of approx. 900 million m³. The area affected by the prehistoric rock avalanche is located in the Steirische Eisenwurzen UGGp in the province of Styria. Based on topographic reconstruction of the pre-event terrain and the release mass, we simulate the dynamics of the rock avalanche with the open-source mass flow simulation tool r.avaflow 3. This tool is equipped with

• a new, highly automatized, work flow for constructing VR-ready meshes in the open-source software Blender 3 and, on this basis, to generate videos that can be watched in VR with simple anaglyph or 3D glasses; and
• a script to generate animations (sequences) of landslide dynamics in the game development software Unreal Engine 5, based on the meshes produced in Blender 3.

Such sequences can be integrated in immersive VR gaming applications of various levels of complexity. Players can trigger multiple landslides at different pre-defined locations and different times. In our proof-of-concept-study, we present a simple one-player game in which the Wildalpen Rock Avalanche can be triggered by grabbing a magic wand and touching with it the release area of the landslide. After the avalanche has come to rest, a piece of a fir (Abies alba), which was embedded in the rock avalanche sediments, appears at the surface of the deposit. Such  tree logs have been used to date the event. The log can be grabbed by the player and, when touched with the magic wand, will tell how it has experienced the rock avalanche and the time after.

Remaining technical challenges include possible effects of flow-type landslides on the players. Unreal Engine 5 is centred on interactions between discrete objects: whereas it would be straightforward to displace a player hit by a falling rock, dragging away a player by a continuously moving flow represented by a sequence of meshes is much more demanding from a game development perspective.

Acknowledgement: This work is part of the project "Moving mountains - landslides as geosystem services in Austrian geoparks" (ESS22-24 - MOVEMONT) funded through the Earth System Sciences programme of the Austrian Academy of Sciences.

How to cite: Mergili, M., Pfeffer, H., Köstner, J., Gosch, L., Kellerer-Pirklbauer, A., Eulenstein, J., and Gulas, O.: Immersive virtual reality gaming for geoeducation: proof-of-concept for the prehistoric Wildalpen Rock Avalanche, Austria, EGU General Assembly 2023, Vienna, Austria, 23–28 Apr 2023, EGU23-2743, https://doi.org/10.5194/egusphere-egu23-2743, 2023.

Expedition Sea Level - a time travel to unveil the mysteries of sea level rise : becoming an actor of climate change is a numerical interactive activity designed as a game for middle school students (11 - 15 years old) to learn the links between sea level rise, the melt of glaciers and ice sheets, and human activities. This includes various notions to help them understand why sea level changes, how ice sheets and glaciers evolve and are studied, the ideas of uncertain futures, mitigation and adaptation.

This activity is to be discovered in group or alone, in class or in scientific facilities when classes come to visit and encounter the actors and actresses of science. Another of its goal is to create discussions and debates among students on various subjects regarding climate change but also to help them understand the scientific processes behind the different changes happening or incoming, in order to fight increasing eco-anxiety.

To do so, a fictional narrative is decomposed in three chapters with a growing immersion for the audience. The first one is a short animation staging a young Maldivian girl in 2081, going to see her grandparents whom house is partially underwater. The second one is designed as a first person shooter game where the public 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 choices tree game, leading to three IPCC scenario (low, intermediary and high). The choices made by the player.s lead to one out of the three scenario in which the public needs to find the best adaptation plan to protect the grandparents from the first chapter.

Expedition Sea Level is the result of a diploma project conducted alongside the european research project PROTECT. This fully illustrated project answers the communication needs of PROTECT but also the needs of understanding and entertainment expectations of middle school students, based on an anonymous survey conducted among 71 middle school students, mainland France, from December 2021 to February 2022.

How to cite: Foucher, C., Chapuis, A., Durand, G., Barré, J.-B., and Bataille, A.: Cryosphere and sea level rise : A numerical interactive educational activity, EGU General Assembly 2023, Vienna, Austria, 23–28 Apr 2023, EGU23-7237, https://doi.org/10.5194/egusphere-egu23-7237, 2023.

Historical events provide a valuable source of information about the risk environment.  Risk analysts recognise a substantial degree of variability in the way in which a hazard event evolves.  Alternatively, a historical event might have evolved to yield a lower or higher societal loss. These better or worse alternatives are referred to as upward and downward counterfactuals. For enhancing risk awareness, it is instructive to explore downward counterfactuals.

Typically, assessments of extreme events are undertaken by hazard domain experts.  However, there is no systematic procedure for spotting missing extreme events.  Furthermore, group meetings may be prone to groupthink, or other forms of human cognitive bias.  For disastrous river floods, Merz et al. (2021)[1] have suggested that biases of wishful thinking may be avoided by purposefully constructing downward counterfactuals.

An innovative systematic procedure for searching for extreme hazard events has been developed by the author[2].  This procedure can take the form of a round-table game, in which each person takes a turn in suggesting a further downward counterfactual; a way in which the loss might have been worse. This game has some similarities with the traditional Victorian parlour game of consequences, in which each player follows on from the preceding player. This type of parlour game is a socially engaging and instructive way for players to explore the range of extreme events.

This round-table game of exploring downward counterfactuals, which could be played for any geohazard, is illustrated by UK flood risk.  One of the most salient near-miss events arose from persistent rain across the Peak District and Yorkshire Dales at the end of July 2019. when half a month’s rain fell. Water poured through the spillway of the Toddbrook Reservoir dam, above the town of Whaley Bridge. The spillway started to erode and concrete ballasts began to rip away. More than 1,500 residents of Whaley Bridge had to leave their homes for six nights after the reservoir dam threatened to breach.

A round-table game would generate a series of notable downward counterfactuals of the 2019 flood risk at Whaley Bridge.  These would be informed by meteorological data, and the independent Toddbrook reservoir review report, which concluded it is unlikely that the spillway would have survived the probable maximum flood, and that if the event had been more intense, or extended for a longer period, catastrophic failure of the dam may have occurred.

Few UK catastrophic dam failures have occurred, and fortunately there has been no loss of life due to dam disasters in the UK since 1925.  Through downward counterfactual games, exploration of near-misses, such as the severe rainfall of July 2019, can provide important insight into the risk of catastrophic dam failure, and the timeliness of risk mitigation measures.

How to cite: Woo, G.: A Round-Table Game for Exploring Extreme Risk Outcomes, EGU General Assembly 2023, Vienna, Austria, 23–28 Apr 2023, EGU23-1211, https://doi.org/10.5194/egusphere-egu23-1211, 2023.

QUARTETnary is an educational card game about the geological time scale. Suitable for ages 7 and up, the game play follows that of the classic card game ‘quartets’, where players aim to collect sets of four cards belonging to a specific group (in this case, a certain geological time period). At the end of the game, the player with the most complete geological time line (i.e., the most quartets) wins the game! 

QUARTETnary consists of 15 different card quartets, each corresponding to a different geological eon, era, or period, starting in the Hadean and ending in the Quaternary. For each quartet, the cards represent key events, animals, or processes. For example, the Hadean consists of 1) the formation of the Moon; 2) Earth’s magma ocean; 3) the layered Earth; and 4) the first occurrence of liquid water on the planet. The cards specifically focus on geodynamic processes (i.e., the presence of supercontinents and the formation of various mountain ranges) and evolutionary developments (i.e., bacteria, land plants, mammals etc.) as well as major global events such as mass extinctions and the Cambrian explosion of life. They are illustrated in accordance with the official colour scheme set by the International Commission on Stratigraphy to ensure easy comparison with the official geological time scale.

Here, we present an update on the development of QUARTETnary (with new cards!) and the projected launch schedule of QUARTETnary’s business plan and Kickstarter campaign, which we will use to produce and distribute the game.

How to cite: van Zelst, I. and Pérez-Díaz, L.: QUARTETnary - The card game about the geological time scale, EGU General Assembly 2023, Vienna, Austria, 23–28 Apr 2023, EGU23-9153, https://doi.org/10.5194/egusphere-egu23-9153, 2023.

This presentation aims to present the board game " The adventure to knowledge " as a tool to facilitate the teaching-learning process. It was created to help the dissemination and communication of science in the context of an international and interdisciplinary research project that studies the environmental changes that have occurred over the last 7500 years in the southeast coast of Mozambique. In the game, each player is invited to take on the role of a researcher participating in a fieldwork where they will create knowledge to write a book. To do so, he/she will need material and human resources to analyze several paleoenvironmental indicators, and the speed with which he/she will do so will depend on several constraints. This game is available at https://ccvalg.pt/inmoz/inmozEN.html

This study had the support of national funds through Fundação para a Ciência e Tecnologia (FCT), under the project LA/P/0069/2020 granted to the Associate Laboratory ARNET and UID/00350/2020 CIMA, and the project PTDC/HAR-ARQ/28148/2017, granted to the researcher with the following contract CEECINST/00146/2018/CP1493/CT0002.

How to cite: Veiga-Pires, C., Oliveira, S., and Gomes, A.: The adventure to knowledge: A game that teaches how environmental changes that occurred in Mozambique during the Holocene were investigated, EGU General Assembly 2023, Vienna, Austria, 23–28 Apr 2023, EGU23-14449, https://doi.org/10.5194/egusphere-egu23-14449, 2023.

The presenters would like to showcase a game they have created through funding allocated by the British Society of Soil science. The original brief of the project was to demonstrate the ability of soils to deliver on the UN Sustainable Development Goals, specifically Zero Hunger, Clean Water and Climate Action. We also wanted to capture the interlinking complexity of soil in a simple, fun, and educational format in order to promote how amazingly intricate and fascinating soils are.

The resulting game is called Dirty Matters: The Soil Game and focuses on how soil management practises affect soil, which in turn affect the SDGs. Dirty matters is a fully cooperative game where the players embody soil organisms (including the mole, earthworm, and mycorrhizal fungi) and move around the soil implementing soil management techniques (such as cover crops, no tillage regimes, and adding manure) to counteract the events that negatively impact the soil (such as soil compaction, acid rain, and erosion). This is all done with the overarching aim of keeping the soil healthy enough to meet the yield requirements of a growing population whilst trying to avoid polluting water and excessive carbon loss.

The process of making this boardgame initially involved brainstorming sessions to form a game design and then rigorous research to make sure our concepts were backed by up-to-date science. Once a playable game design was achieved, we started play testing with other soil scientists and a variety of other communities to make sure both the mechanics and science worked, tweaking the game after each session to incorporate feedback. The final stages included making it look appealing by engaging with a graphic designer. As of today, Dirty Matters is free to download and printer friendly educational tool to advance the understanding of soil and how we should take care of it and everything in it.

How to cite: Burak, E. and Christina Van Midden, C.: Dirty Matters: The Soil Game, EGU General Assembly 2023, Vienna, Austria, 23–28 Apr 2023, EGU23-17593, https://doi.org/10.5194/egusphere-egu23-17593, 2023.