Gamifying Sustainable Systems Science

Polymers are around us in all kinds of shapes and formats. With the context of microplastics, when these very small pieces of these polymers are breaking off, they're getting into environments or spaces that we may not want them to be. And in this class, we spend a lot of time looking at circular economy solutions, not just in the context of recycling, but much more broadly. How can we rethink the design of products? How can we rethink how we make businesses work and the broader economy as a whole? So students in this class have been learning about the challenges, the opportunities, the innovations and the technologies, and in this game they're pulling all of it together where they have to make strategic decisions about the supply of materials that they have, the environmental impact that they have, while still earning enough revenue to win the game. The game rewarded you for product extension or replacing a product instead of using a critical material that could be blocked by trade or rising costs and so this ties into real world by like rising company costs and production costs material availability and just overall rising prices for the consumer as well so one of the core elements that we focus on is systems thinking and how to find more sustainable and environmentally friendly ways of making things work we use systems thinking tools heavily when considering finding a balance between growth and environmental sustainability. One of the things that we really try to do in our Sustainable Systems Science major is to provide students with the chance to interact with the real-world challenges. Often students in a university setting get a lot of the theory, so we really try to use those opportunities to ground in a gamified way in this example, but also taking them out into the community, interacting with real businesses. That hands-on practical reality of both opportunity and constraint is what makes our students really empowered and capable for going out and solving these problems in the world.