About Climate Detectives: Open for Business®
Climate Detectives: Open for Business® is a project-based collaborative learning experience, where children build science and math skills through sustainable city development.
In this game, two or more players work to create sustainable, environmentally-friendly economies, which are resilient to natural disasters. Players must make strategic decisions on how to design towns that can withstand hurricanes, ecosystem collapses, disease outbreaks, droughts, oil spills, and more. While this game is designed for ages 12 through 15, players as young as 4 (and as old as 76!) have enjoyed playing it.
Climate Detectives: Open for Business® goes past telling children to recycle, eat less meat, and take the bus to school. This game equips children with positive, productive strategies about surviving against climate change – something that will support them in our ever-changing, increasingly hot world.
Making of the Game
When Paige started graduate work at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill, she was studying school psychology. During her second year of studies, she worked at an in-patient psychiatric hospital in rural North Carolina, where she saw first-hand the true impact environmental degradation and lack of access to resources (like clean drinking water and breathing air) has had on our country’s children.
Every single day she worked with these patients, her heart got broken. In a 2019 school psychology intervention class, she built the original idea for Climate Detectives: Open for Business®, which was a climate change resiliency tool for children in rural communities.
With the blessing of her department, she applied to an experimental design program, where she was given a full ride to pursue building this climate solution.
That’s where she met her co-founder, Jake. Jake shared the same passion for climate resiliency, for climate justice, and for the protection and advocation of our world’s children. They applied Paige’s research to a group project, where they were awarded a grant by the UNC Reese Innovation Lab to build the game.
For the next three years, Paige and Jake would work nights and weekends to build Climate Detectives: Open for Business®. They were supported by program manager Diane Boswell and illustrator Samantha Fowler.
Jake coded and programmed the game, spent months fine-tuning and aligning the rules, and strengthened the grounding in real-world sustainable technologies. He developed the online simulations necessary to support game development during the pandemic.
Paige play-tested the game with over 300 children and parents at coffee shops, in schools, at airports, in homes, and at playgrounds. She worked closely with Samantha to create illustrations about environmental problems and natural disasters that were visually appealing, and not scary, to children.
And with the right balance of play and education, they created a beautiful game that children love. Because the game is for the greater good, it runs on a non-profit model — no money is made from it!
Thank you to the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill and to the children of Brooklyn, New York for supporting this dream.