Using mobile gaming technology, Mission 1.5 educates people about climate solutions and asks them to vote on the actions that they want to see happen.
https://www.mission1point5.org/about
This new climate change related online activity is an interesting idea, combining a series of what are basically multiple choice questions (that give the user options for what their government should do to meet the 1.5 degree challenge) with calls to action for individual and national-level behaviour change.
Responses from your selected country will be aggregated and submitted to your government as your “vote”…
What will we do with the results?
Your vote, and those from your country, will be compiled and presented to your government to encourage bolder climate action. Votes will also be counted in a global tally. So stay tuned for the results!
https://www.mission1point5.org/about
Presumably this vote piece is only prearranged with the 12 countries (plus the EU) that are listed. In addition the game mechanics themselves are a little odd given your choice for each point is really between two items as one is clearly a ‘red herring’. The onscreen results from the ‘quiz’ record 10, 700 or 1000 points depending on your answer to a question and combine into a total score for tackling the 1.5 challenge across multiple areas such as “farms and foods”, “transport”, etc.
Does it educate?
The first quote included above specifically states the resource “educates people”. Obviously I could write a lot here about what educating someone actually means versus learning something, etc. What I will try to focus on is if someone is likely to learn anything from the activity. The answer, of course, will be “it depends”.
If we take the cattle example, in the above screenshot, there is a lot of pre-requisite knowledge required – for example a reading level to comprehend “livestock” and “plant-based diet”, albeit with mobile-style friendly graphics as visual clues. Beyond reading ability, there is no real information on the different option and what they mean – thus the light touch to any kind of knowledge content could be confusing and if you really wanted/needed to learn something from this you would likely have to do some research away from the resource. This is not helped by the text being image based and, therefore, you can not simply select text and ask your browser to search the web for more information.
Therefore, I am tempted to say this resource might be quite useful for a school to run through in a group, i.e. with a teacher/facilitator in place to use it to foster discussion, rather than as a learning resource per se.
How could it be improved?
10, 700 and 1000 don’t obviously relate to the 1.5 degree temperature and it is not very clear from the onscreen graphics how many ‘points’ are needed as a minimum for your choices to meet your country’s requirements. Indeed there is a contradiction between not wanting to add to temperature but also needing a high score. It would be better if the scoring was somehow reversed – e.g. starting with your high carbon total and then cutting it with a % target to reach 1.5 from a high score.
There is also a risk here from oversimplifying as, presumably, the carbon impact of some choices would be more in some countries than others (this complexity might be built in but I doubt it).
The “none of the above” option on the vote really does not work either as a form of learning summary nor as a mockup of the democratic action. Particularly if the intention of the resource is for actual democratic input…
Reliable information on public opinion on climate action
This is given, in a related YouTube video’s description, as a reason for the website’s vote element:
However, it is clearly a limited activity with just three (well two) options to consider per question and then the user being very heavily prompted to select the ‘best’ option for each section’s three questions as the vote. I must admit I voted a few “none of the above” responses in a Brewster’s Millions style mood.
Summary
Overall this feels like one of those examples of where someone wants to try to achieve educational outcomes but they have limited content, a desire to reduce instruction (but to the point of irrelevance) and really only manage to leverage the gaming expertise involved (which seems considerable from the “about” page) to graphics/UI and little else. It also highlights the incredible difficulty in building content for a global audience with no personalisation or clear target audience.
Whose Education Is It Anyway? 