A serious game to inform young citizens on canal water maintenance

In order to support the creation of sustainable and healthyecosystems, citizens should have knowledge of the necessary maintenanceneeded. For example, they should be aware of the challenges of maintain-ing proper urban surface waters, so that they can take on a responsibleand proactive role. Ideally, citizens should acquire this knowledge froman early age. We describe the design, implementation, and evaluationof the serious gameHydro Hero, aimed at forming and reinforcing thisawareness and reasoning. Hydro Hero is an infinite runner game withextended minigames, which show bothwhatshould not be on the canalsas well aswhythey should be removed. We assessed the ability of Hy-dro Hero to teach young children about canal maintenance by combininga questionnaire with open-ended play-testing sessions at a science mu-seum. On average, players were able to improve their ability to justifywhy certain items should be removed or left in a canal. It has not beenfully confirmed that Hydro Hero conveyed this specific knowledge, dueto the absence of quizzing beforehand. However, given the high partic-ipants' engagement, we consider the game to have contributed to theirawareness about the importance of canal cleaning for a sustainable urbanenvironment.

@InProceedings { ADGHKSSBB19,
  author       = "Appel, Yoeri and Dimitrov, Yordan and Gnodde, Sjoerd and Heerden, Natasja van and Kools, Pieter and Swaab,
                  Daniel and Salamon, Nestor Z. and Balint, J. Timothy and Bidarra, Rafael",
  title        = "A serious game to inform young citizens on canal water maintenance",
  booktitle    = "Games and Learning Alliance",
  series       = "LNCS",
  volume       = "11899",
  pages        = "394 -- 403",
  year         = "2019",
  publisher    = "Springer International Publishing",
  note         = "8th International Conference, GALA 2019, Athens, Greece, November 27-29, 2019",
  url          = "http://graphics.tudelft.nl/Publications-new/2019/ADGHKSSBB19"
}