Changing our behaviors can be hard. Biking to work rather than drive there can be too tough a challenge. So can avoiding the use of disposables. Yet might there be a different way forward?
An increasing number of examples show that change can be much easier than we may think. The key to it is gamification. For some time gamification has been proving highly useful in fields like medicine and education. Now it is also reshaping the ways we strive to save the planet.
For instance, cleverly designed games can transport people back into the distant past and teach them to appreciate the evolution of life. Meanwhile, games of forecasting can let us experience the consequences of our actions or inaction in the future. Games can entertain us or frighten us, but they can also inspire us and help us invent novel solutions to complex dilemmas.
The simplest way to gamify sustainability is to green what’s already viral. Imagine Spider-Man or Assassin’s Creed players trying to save a city from a flood or the world of Civilization facing biodiversity loss and resource depletion. Actually, some massively popular games are already treading such paths. Monitoring ecosystem health is already a part of SimCity and Minecraft has a special mode featuring climate change, carbon taxes, and emissions offsets through planting trees.
Adafruit publishes a wide range of writing and video content, including interviews and reporting on the maker market and the wider technology world. Our standards page is intended as a guide to best practices that Adafruit uses, as well as an outline of the ethical standards Adafruit aspires to. While Adafruit is not an independent journalistic institution, Adafruit strives to be a fair, informative, and positive voice within the community – check it out here: adafruit.com/editorialstandards
Stop breadboarding and soldering – start making immediately! Adafruit’s Circuit Playground is jam-packed with LEDs, sensors, buttons, alligator clip pads and more. Build projects with Circuit Playground in a few minutes with the drag-and-drop MakeCode programming site, learn computer science using the CS Discoveries class on code.org, jump into CircuitPython to learn Python and hardware together, TinyGO, or even use the Arduino IDE. Circuit Playground Express is the newest and best Circuit Playground board, with support for CircuitPython, MakeCode, and Arduino. It has a powerful processor, 10 NeoPixels, mini speaker, InfraRed receive and transmit, two buttons, a switch, 14 alligator clip pads, and lots of sensors: capacitive touch, IR proximity, temperature, light, motion and sound. A whole wide world of electronics and coding is waiting for you, and it fits in the palm of your hand.
Have an amazing project to share? The Electronics Show and Tell is every Wednesday at 7pm ET! To join, head over to YouTube and check out the show’s live chat – we’ll post the link there.
Python for Microcontrollers — Python on Microcontrollers Newsletter: 100 CircuitPython Community Libraries, a New Arduino UNO and much more! #CircuitPython #Python #micropython @ThePSF @Raspberry_Pi
