The most passionate and effective advocates for addressing climate change are often children. Their concern for the planet’s future, coupled with their untarnished optimism and innate sense of justice, empowers them to become formidable activists. Children’s voices can inspire action, mobilize communities, and demand accountability from leaders. From organizing school strikes to creating impactful social media campaigns, young activists are reshaping the climate change narrative.

1. This section is still under development – but coming!!

Climate Websites for Kids

Climate Action Games

App Games

• From the Cranky Uncle Website:  “The Cranky Uncle game uses cartoons and critical thinking to fight misinformation. The game was developed by Monash University scientist John Cook, in collaboration with creative agency Goodbeast. The game is now available for free on iPhone, Android, and as a browser game.”

  Bärbel Winkler of Skeptical Science notes: “To explain why and how some people reject scientific evidence, Cook created the character Cranky Uncle, the family member we all have who thinks he knows better than the world’s scientists.”

  “A key solution to making the public more resilient against fake news is inoculation – avoid being misled by learning the techniques of denial….In the Cranky Uncle game, players are mentored by a cartoon personification of climate science denial. Cranky Uncle explains 14 techniques of science denial, from fake experts to cherry picking and a variety of different logical fallacies.”

  Get your own cranky uncle to play with you!

Board Games

• Gaming for Justice is kind of a board game and kind of a group game. The structure of the game is like Dungeons and Dragons, so there’s a board and dice, but there’s more to it. The video at the link above shows adults leading kids or acting out parts in a story that the kids are characters in. Not all of the stories that Mycelium Youth Network has created are related to climate change: one, for example, was about police brutality. However, in each scenario, kids take direct action to solve fantasized community problems based on actual issues.
• Go Goals!, created by United Nations Regional Information Centre for Western Europe, is a board game available in multiple languages and intended to help children understand the United Nations’ Sustainable Development Goals.
• In the board game Minions of Disruption, a board game developed by Shu Liang, the founder and director of Day of Adaptation, players are colleagues in organizations or neighbors from the same community combating climate minions, Carbions and Climmies, that cause climate change. Players cooperate to activate Zillians, superheros who provide organizations with resilience for a sustainable future.

Video console Games

The Xbox 360 Games for Change Challenge is a collaborative effort between Microsoft and Games for Change (G4C), a subgroup of the Serious Games Initiative. The challenge is a worldwide competition to develop a global warming game with Microsoft’s XNA Game Studio Express software. Winners will be awarded scholarships from Games for Change and Microsoft, and the winning games will have the possibility of being available for download on the Xbox Live Arcade service. The Xbox 360 Games for Change Challenge has been cast by Microsoft as a “socially-minded” initiative, joining the larger serious games movement.

And video games and virtual reality definitely are here – and in the future about the environment and the climate.  For instance, as CSteps Facebook member Alex notes:

• “Sonic the Hedgehog 1 and 2 is all about saving forest creatures from being horrifically turned into robots, while Ori and the Blind Forest is a game where a forest starts dying leading to famine and Ori unlocks that she has powers to breathe life back into the forests and save the wildlife there.
• Final Fantasy 7 has a big monopolized electric company harvesting life energy from the planet itself to power the cities and stuff and you spend the first few levels trying to blow up reactors to slow down the damage they’re doing to the planet.”

  But unless one is playing with a climate denier and wins this person over to become a climate activist (not an eco-terrorist!), these games don’t actually do anything to prevent carbon emissions int he air – in fact, playing them draws a lot of energy.

  Something more constructive is the course featured in the left image that unfortunately is no longer offered by the Museum of Design Atlanta (MODA), but something similar should be

Environmental Games

Board Games

• Act to Adapt is a giant board game requiring the community team to prioritize community resources that may be vulnerable to extreme weather and then take actions to protect those resources from being destroyed by the hazard team.
• Keep Cool is a board game created by the Potsdam Institute for Climate Impact Research and published by the German company Spieltrieb in November 2004. Up to six players representing the world’s countries compete to balance their own economic interests and the world’s climate in a game of negotiation. The goal of the game as stated by the authors is to “promote the general knowledge on climate change and the understanding of difficulties and obstacles, and “to make it available for a board game and still retain the major elements and processes.” A quantitative-empirical study with more than 200 students shows that Keep Cool facilitates experimental learning about climate change and helps “to develop individual beliefs about sustainable development by experiencing complex system dynamics that are not tangible in everyday life.”
• Rescue Polar Bears.  It is what it says it is, but as the author of Dayad’s game above says, the game “is distant” in time (2045) and place (Arctic.)

Group Games (No board, no video, no app, just people)

• The Greenhouse Gas Game is part of the Y-adapt curriculum intended to help children understand climate change. Players act as either incoming sunlight heat or as greenhouse gasses to learn how those gasses trap heat, and how that is related to global warming, as well as the hazardous effects of global warming.

Online/Browser Games

• 🏫 Coral Bleaching is a simple online game for young children. Players can experiment with the effects of changing the temperature, level of pollution and storms on bleaching coral.
• Crabby’s Reef is a classic arcade-style game created at SeriousGeoGames Lab in the Energy and Environment Institute at the University of Hull, UK. Players search for food and avoid predators. As they advance, they move into a future where increasing ocean acidity makes survival more difficult.