Natural Heritage: A Teaching Game For Biodiversity Conservation

Daniel Vedder , Stefan Fallert, Jakob Seitz, Tobias Lengfeld, Jan Erik Fischer, Sebastian von Mammen, Juliano Sarmento Cabral, Andreas Knote

The potential for computer games to serve as effective learning and teaching tools is now widely acknowledged. Here, we present ‘Natural Heritage’, an educational turn-based strategy game about biodiversity conservation. In it, the player takes on the role of an elected policy maker who has to balance ecological and economic targets while managing regional land use. The game aims to teach key principles of ecology by integrating them into its game mechanics, such as habitat heterogeneity or the species-area relationship. It also challenges players to think about the economic and political aspects of conservation. The game is open source and available online, and is intended to be used to accompany instruction in an upper secondary or undergraduate class. In this paper, we explain the goal, design, and mechanics of the game, and describe the underlying mathematical model that drives the social-ecological simulation based on the player's input.