The Green Free School creates climate friendly games with and for youth

Two teachers, Klara Andrés Rask and Ane Würtz Lauridsen, from the Green Free School in Copenhagen, Denmark, participated in Youth for Youth’s facilitator training in Game Design in the fall of 2021. They have afterwards applied their competences in the school as they implemented game development activities with  6th, 7th,, 8th  and 9th graders (youth at the age of 12 to 15). 
 
At the Green Free School they work project based and have trained youth in applying innovative tools and strategies as they go through four phases of implementation. For a month and a half, the 6th and 7th graders went through the four phases of the so-called FIRE-model, while the 8th and 9th graders had a shorter two week course. They, however, had a common goal: To create games to educate others about the environmental challenges of the world. Their target group were youth of their own age group. 

They went through the four phases of the FIRE-model: Understanding (Danish: Forståelse), Idégeneration, Realization and Evaluation. In general, Ane explained, the first phase demands a larger amount of time for the youth to really get immersed into and understand the topic and in this case the highly complex and interconnected topic that the climate crisis is. In order to support the students journey with understanding the topic and trying out game development for the first time, they decided to limit the scope and focus on: Food and climate.  
Ane further shared that the innovative pedagogics of the Green Free School is based on having an authentic receiver. They therefore established a collaboration with NOAH, a Danish environmental organization, who came to the school and introduced their work, made workshops focussing on climate friendly nutrition and later on in the process they were also game testers. Finally they received the games for their further work with implementing workshops with young people about environmental questions. 

Here is a link for NOAH’s home page in which they have written more about the collaboration and you can see even more pictures of the games they developed: https://www.noah.dk/nyheder/elever-fra-den-groenne-friskole-udvikler-klimabraetspil-til-noah ​edit.