You’re humanity’s most important gardener… and it’s up to you to help astronauts survive.
You are a biosphere scientist based on Earth — it’s your job to research optimal growing conditions for an EcoCELL on the alien world. The lives of the astronauts colonizing other planets depends on your success. If you fail, the astronauts are at risk. If you succeed, the colonies of this new planet can grow and flourish.
You are a biosphere scientist based on Earth — it’s your job to research optimal growing conditions for an EcoCELL on the alien world. The lives of the astronauts colonizing other planets depends on your success. If you fail, the astronauts are at risk. If you succeed, the colonies of this new planet can grow and flourish.
While on Earth, you will simulate the growing conditions that the astronaut gardeners experience so you can create experiments to help understand their unique growing conditions. Based on the insights you gain from your experiments, you can recommend that the astronauts adjust variables like water, sunlight, oxygen, soil composition, and more, to improve crop output or to provide some other key benefit.
Alien Gardner will be available on all platforms and systems with an internet connection. The game can be played in 30 minutes.
Alien Gardner will be available on all platforms and systems with an internet connection. The game can be played in 30 minutes.
Alien Gardener is an educational game to communicate the scientific uses of the EcoCELLs at the Desert Research Institute (DRI) to the public. Topics covered by this game include the scientific method, problem solving, how to make decisions based on data; biospheres, biology, EcoCELLs, botany, space travel, the solar system, and other topics.
The game will address Next Generation Science Standards including, but not limited to:
HS-ESS3-2: Evaluate competing design solutions for developing, managing, and utilizing, energy and mineral resources based on cost benefit ratios.
HS-ESS3-3: Create a computational simulation to illustrate the relationship!s among management of natural resources, the sustainability of human populations, and biodiversity.
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Based at the Wisconsin Center for Educational Research at the University of Wisconsin - Madison, we are a truly interdisciplinary team of educational researchers, software engineers, artists, and storytellers, exploring the intersection of current learning science and media design, specializing in mobile media, video games, and simulation. Seeking to do what’s never been done before, we constantly innovate, play, take risks, and mess-make.
