Invasive species are non-native species that cause ecological, environmental harm to the environment and/or harm to people. The aim of this project is to teach children about invasive species and the effect of these species on the environment. To accomplish this aim, the University of Florida Center for Aquatic and Invasive Plants (UF IFAS) developed a board game titled Lakeville. Lakeville has been deployed as part of a science class in Florida classrooms and evaluations have shown that children improved their knowledge of invasive species from playing the game. To ensure that Lakeville can be accessible to children outside the classroom and teach children about the mechanisms used to control invasive species, we created a mobile strategy game (Lakeville Protectors). A paper detailing the process of transforming the board game to a digital game was accepted at the 2017 ACM SIGCHI annual symposium on computer-human interaction in play (CHI PLAY) extended abstracts. A link to the paper is provided in the publications section and a poster detailing the main ideas in the paper is provided in the poster section. This project is in collaboration with UF Digital Worlds Institute and the UF IFAS.

The Team

Dr. Lisa Anthony
Aishat Aloba
Gabriel Coleman
Triton Ong
Shan Yan
Dehlia Albrecht
Marko Suvajdzic

Publications

Refereed Conference Posters
Aloba, A., Coleman, G., Ong, T., Yan, S., Suvajdzic, M., Albrecht, D., Anthony, L. 2017. From Board Game to Digital Game: Designing a Mobile Game for Children to Learn About Invasive Species. CHI PLAY’17 Extended Abstracts, October 15–18, 2017, Amsterdam, Netherlands, pages 375-382. [Pdf]