Creating forest games - a tool for forestpedagogy
"Technology is pulling our youths away from understanding and knowing forest. This is our way to turn table around and use games to bring inspiration and knowledge back, piece by piece."
Youths in Finland are not interested about forestry and hiking in forest as situation was 10 years ago. Going to forest and knowing how forest works is not as crystal clear as it was. We are solving this problem using same digital technology to get them excited about forest and nature.
Finnish 4H Federation and Lapland University of Applied Sciences have developed ways of gamify Finnish nature. We have created games, which contains facts about forest in fun and entertaining package. Participants are divided into two groups in workshop. Both groups are making Part1 and Part2.
In part 1 participants are creating simple game mechanic using MakeyMakey to combine digital world to real world forestry assets. Participants will use forest goods and technology (MakeyMakey + Scratch) to create own game recognizing eatable goods that forest provides.
In part 2 we introduce ways to use games educationally about Forestry and Recreational use of nature.
Combined with part 1 and part 2 participants will get ideas, tools and tips how to combine nature and games. They will get vision how forest games are used as part of educational duty about forestry.
In this workshop we share our idea how to activate wide variety of target groups and how we did it ourselves in Äkräs project.
