Category: Uncategorized

By Paul Choi and Miguel Garrido

For several decades, motor vehicles have been a major source of greenhouse gas (GHG) emissions and pollution in the US. According to the EPA, in 2015 the transportation sector accounted for about 27 percent of total U.S. GHG emissions, second only to the electricity sector. Scientists have long emphasized the adverse effects of vehicle emissions, since GHG emissions cause global warming and drive climate change. Accordingly, U.S. public policy has in recent years aimed to increase the fuel efficiency of motor vehicles.

Yet the effects of vehicle emissions on human health remain significant. Air pollution poses a major risk to public health, and major studies have established a strong link between vehicle emissions and illnesses such as asthma, cardiovascular disease, diabetes, and lung cancer. However, consumer surveys indicate that most car buyers don’t consider these health effects when making purchasing decisions.

Moreover, fuel efficiency ranked 8^th out of the top 10 factors that consumers consider when buying cars. This is troubling given that the fuel economy of a vehicle is a high-leverage point that can substantially reduce tailpipe emissions and thus improve public health.

EcoRace: A Board Game to Influence Car-Buying Decisions

We designed a board game called EcoRace to address the two primary problems outlined above. First, fuel efficiency is currently not one of the primary factors that consumers take into account when buying a new car. Second, although the effects of vehicle emissions on global warming have been well publicized, the impact on human health remains unclear or unknown to a lot of people.

EcoRace is a game played with two teams of two players each (it is cooperative among teammates yet competitive among teams). Each team has six cars (3 cars per player) of different fuel efficiencies: low, medium, and high. The objective of the game is to get all six cars to the finish line before the other team.

The rules of the game are simple: first, one player chooses a car to move and rolls the die. The player then moves the car on the board by the number displayed on the die multiplied by the MPG of the car (1 for low, 2 for medium, and 3 for high fuel efficiency). Then a player from the second team choose a car to move and rolls the die, and teams take turns in this way to move around the blocks.

To promote cooperation among teammates, players can choose to move two cars together if they land on the same square (this is an analogy to carpooling in the real world). Hence, strategic decisions about moving specific cars and waiting for your teammate to go move together occur throughout the game.

Additionally, the game includes 12 specific “Chance” blocks, which require the player that lands on them to pick up a Chance Card and read the instructions. The Chance Cards are data-driven and provide impactful statistics on the health effects of vehicles emissions. They reward fuel efficient cars and punish low fuel economy cars.

Audience and goals

The primary audience for this board game is young millennials who are considering buying a new car. We picked this demographic because their car-buying behavior can yield important insights about the future of vehicle emissions in this country. On one hand, studies indicate that the recent recession, coupled with the meltdown of the auto industry in 2009 and the rise of ride-hailing apps such as Uber, caused a stark decline in car ownership rates among millennials. Yet on the other hand, recent data indicate that millennials aren’t ditching car ownership altogether – they are simply delaying it.

However, surveys indicate that the health impacts of vehicle emissions, and fuel efficiency in general, are not key factors that millennials take into account when making purchasing decisions. Instead, they focus on features such as navigation system, satellite radio, Bluetooth, and mobile integration.

Our goals for EcoRace are thus threefold, each corresponding to a different time horizon. In the short run, we hope that millennials who play this game will understand the link between vehicle emissions and health problems. We believe this link is critical to making fuel efficiency a key buying factor, since that is the primary mechanism though which tailpipe emissions (and adverse health effects) can be reduced.

Our medium-term goal for EcoRace is to actually influence eco-friendly car-buying decisions among millennials. Specifically, we aim to make fuel efficiency a top factor (at least in the top 3 features) that they consider when buying a vehicle. In the long term, our hope is that millennials will choose to drive their fuel-efficient cars less and even ditch gasoline cars altogether, instead opting for electric cars or public transportation (our final thoughts below expand on this idea).

Data: Making heath information central to the game

As mentioned above, the health impact of vehicle emissions is the key theme of EcoRace, and we chose to make the health information central to the game by directly incorporating it into the Chance Cards, thus influencing the actual decisions that players make when moving their pieces along the board. An example of a chance card is:

Hazardous air pollutants (toxics) have been linked to birth defects, cancer, and other serious illnesses. The EPA estimates that the air toxics emitted from cars and trucks account for 50% of all cancers caused by air pollution. Your vehicle missions have contributed to increased cancer rates in your community.

If your fuel efficiency is low:  go back 3 spaces

If your fuel efficiency is medium:  go back 2 spaces

If your fuel efficiency is high, go back 1 space

Our chance cards cover a broad range of health impacts associated with vehicle emissions, from asthma to cardiovascular disease to diabetes to lung cancer, all summarized in a data-driven manner.

Testing the game

We tested EcoRace internally first, simulating several games using an early prototype to iterate and improve the pedagogical experience of the game. We then tested the game with four real players (from our target audience of millennials interested in buying a car in the near future). First, the players played a version of the game that was purely competitive (one vs. one), which did yield insights into the learning impact of the Chance Cards (understanding the link between vehicle emissions and human health, and incorporating fuel efficiency into purchasing criteria). However, the competitive aspect of the game did not enable us to promote cooperation, which more broadly speaks to the idea that working and coordinating with others (e.g. carpooling) can be a very effective means of reducing vehicle emissions.

As such, in our second round of testing, we incorporated a cooperative aspect to the game. Now two players would be assigned to each team, and each team would have to work together to strategize their moves along the way (e.g. which cars to move first, which squares to try to land on in order to carpool, etc.). We tested this second version of the game with four players and found that participants directly took into account the benefits of carpooling (e.g. moving two cars at the same time in this context) while still learning about the health impacts of different fuel efficiency levels among their cars. In the end, players viewed their least efficient cars as a nuisance and wished they could only drive cars with a high gas mileage.

To measure the success (or failure) of our game, we performed a simple pre-post interview to gauge the participants’ views regarding fuel efficiency. First, before they even knew what game they were going to play, we asked them to name the car they were most likely to buy (at least the general type) in the near future. Second, after they played one round of the game, we asked them the same question. According to our interviews, all of them said that fuel efficiency would likely be a key purchasing factor. Two of the interviewees even mentioned that learning about the adverse health impact of vehicle emissions would influence their future car-buying decisions, since they were thinking of having children soon.

Benefits of the game and concluding thoughts

EcoRace is a game designed to influence eco-friendly car buying by linking the adverse health effects of vehicle emissions to fuel efficiency. We believe it is effective because it promotes and rewards cooperation, raises awareness about fuel economy and its effects on public health, and provides data-driven mini-stories (in the form of Chance Cards) as part of a broader narrative (making it from home to the beach, which is the finish line in the game). It does so in a playful manner that still retains the key concepts we want millennials to understand about fuel efficiency.

As possible next steps, EcoRace can be improved in several ways. First, the link between the cars in the game to those in real life can be strengthened. Specifically, different car profiles can be developed that correspond to actual vehicle and truck types that consumers can buy, rather than abstract objects that simply have fuel efficiency levels of low, medium, and high. Second, more testing can be done to identify the target audience for this game. Millennials may be too broad a term, and the game may be more effective if we targeted a narrowly defined user (such as kids of a certain age range). Third, the game itself would have to be adopted by key customers in our target sector in order to actually make a difference. These are all possible directions that future enhancements can take with respect to EcoRace. However, we believe the version we’ve developed presents an effective and innovative way of influencing eco-friendly car-buying decisions.

Slide presentation located here

Data Sources:

http://www.nytimes.com/2010/01/13/health/research/13exhaust.html

https://www.healtheffects.org/system/files/SR17TrafficReview_Exec_Summary.pdf

http://www.ucsusa.org/clean-vehicles/vehicles-air-pollution-and-human-health#.WRziI8Zw-Uk

http://www.ucsusa.org/clean-vehicles/vehicles-air-pollution-and-human-health/cars-trucks-air-pollution#.WRzum8Zw-Uk

http://www.energyresourcefulness.org/Health%20Effects%20of%20Gasoline%20and%20Diesel.html

https://www.epa.gov/ghgemissions/sources-greenhouse-gas-emissions

https://www.epa.gov/ghgemissions/sources-greenhouse-gas-emissions#transportation

https://oemsolutions.agameautotrader.com/wp-content/uploads/2013/05/Millennials-Next-Gen-Car-Buyer.pdf

https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC1240770/

http://www.euro.who.int/__data/assets/pdf_file/0006/74715/E86650.pdf

http://www.ehrn.co.za/download/lecture_series_06.pdf

 

 

 

 

By Meghan Kokoski, Mikayla Murphy, Kimberly Yu, and Margaret Yu

Methodology

The main data source we used was the Hubway trips dataset, which contains the start station, end station, timings, and other information for every Hubway ride ever taken.

Early on, we identified that our primary audience was MIT students without a Hubway membership, and that our goal was to encourage these students to purchase annual Hubway memberships. To achieve this goal, we created a set of posters for the Infinite Corridor. Each poster focuses on a specific Hubway bike that plays a certain character in the “Hubway Class of 2017”. The characters were carefully chosen to emphasize unique parts of MIT culture (so as to be relatable to MIT students) while also having a strong data-driven story. We chose to represent the class of 2017 as the MIT class of 2017 is just about to graduate, making it the most current and relatable class. As such, we used Hubway data from September 2016 through February 2017 (the latest available Hubway data as of now).

Our first character was the Hacker bike, which is the Hubway bike that had the most trips at night. Using the dataset, we found that Bike 1738 had the most trips that started between 10 pm and 6 am, with 54 trips.

The second character was the Course 6 bike, which was the bike that had the most trips to or from the Hubway station at the Stata Center. Stata houses most of the Course 6 classes and professors, and Course 6 is the largest major at MIT, so we thought it would be especially relatable to most MIT students. Bike 1382 had the most trips to and from the Stata Center station, with 49 trips (24 trips starting from Stata and 25 trips ending at Stata) .

The third bike was the Greek bike, which was the bike that made the most trips from the main MIT campus to the two stations closest to the MIT Greek houses across the river. The MIT stations were defined as the Stata Center station and the Mass Ave/Amherst St station, and the Greek stations were defined as the Kenmore Square station and the Beacon St/Mass Ave station. Bike 640 had the most trips between these stations with 55 trips.

The last bike was the Firehosed bike, which was defined as the bike that was most busy (aka took the most trips). Being hosed is very relatable to MIT students, so we hoped they’d empathize with Bike 1395, which took 701 total trips between September 2016 and February 2017.

To support each of the stories, we added a second layer of information about biking and Hubway linked to each character. For example, for the Firehosed bike, we added facts about how biking and being outdoors decreases stress, because hosed students are often stressed. For the Course 6 bike, we talked about the environmental impacts that biking has, as Course 6’s are trying to change the world technologically, so why not change the world environmentally too? For the Hacker bike, we added facts about safety, as safety is an important part of the Hacker Code of Ethics, and for the Greek bike, we focused on the time savings, as students who live across the river often complain about the commute time required.

Impact

The four Hubway Class of 2017 posters would be displayed on bulletin boards in the Infinite. Our audience is MIT students who are potential annual Hubway subscribers. Our goals are to raise awareness of the Hubway service, increase Hubway annual memberships, and lower CO2 levels.

We interviewed twelve MIT students who do not have an annual Hubway membership. Before showing them the posters, we asked them the following pre-questions:

1. If you bike, do you own a bike?
2. Have you heard of Hubway?
3. Have you ever used Hubway before?
4. Do you have a Hubway annual membership?
5. If not, how likely are you to get a Hubway annual membership? (1 – not likely to 5 – very likely)
6. If not, why do you not have a Hubway membership? Why do you not already have a bike?
7. If you had to go to Harvard Square, how would you usually get there? (bike, bus, T, car, walk, etc.)
8. Which of these methods of exercising are you most likely to do this weekend: jogging, walking, biking, or something else?
9. How useful do you think biking is? (1 – not useful to 5 – most useful)

We then showed them the posters and asked them to imagine them displayed in the Infinite. After they examined the posters, we asked the following post-questions:

1. (If they didn’t already have Hubway) How likely are you now to get a Hubway annual membership? (1 – not likely to 5 – very likely)
2. After seeing these posters, are you more likely to bike to Harvard Square? (1 – less likely to 5 – more likely)
3. Are you more likely to go cycling as a form of exercise this weekend? (1 – less likely to 5 – more likely)
4. How useful do you think biking is? (1 – not useful to 5 – most useful)
5. What do you like about the posters? What do you think is most effective?
6. What do you not like about the posters? What do you think is least effective?
7. Did we address your concerns about using Hubway?

From the pre-questions, we found that most MIT students have heard of Hubway but are not very likely to get a Hubway membership. The primary reason they do not have a membership is that they seldom go off-campus. We also found that MIT students would most likely take the bus or walk to Harvard Square from MIT, and would most likely walk to exercise over the weekend. They all agree that biking is very useful. After viewing the posters, they were slightly more likely to get a Hubway annual membership. The posters did not affect the likelihood of biking to Harvard Square or cycling to exercise over the weekend. However, their perception of the usefulness of biking increased slightly.

From the feedback on our posters, we learned that MIT students felt more connected to the Hubway service because of the MIT-affiliated bike names and the cute designs. The Course 6 bike and the Firehosed Bike appealed to the most people because they directly addressed the impact of Hubway use on climate change and health. MIT students liked the color scheme and found the layout of the information easy to follow, and the quick facts easy to learn. However, they thought some posters had a lot of text, and they probably wouldn’t stop to read the posters in the Infinite. Although the time comparison was helpful for understanding the usefulness of biking, some people thought it would not be worth it to arrive at an event sweaty from biking, which only saves 2 minutes. MIT students who were not very familiar with Hubway had difficulty understanding the bike id numbers. They were also concerned about the station locations, and one student mentioned how, according to a friend’s experience, the Hubway bike pedals don’t accommodate short people. For the most part, our posters were able to address MIT students’ concerns, particularly in terms of saving time and improving health, and made people seriously consider why they do not have a Hubway annual membership.

by Margaret Tian, Tina Quach, Tony Zeng, Willie Zhu

Intro

Our project was a physical board game titled “Polar Bears: Seal Your Survival” that aimed to teach kids about the impact of global warming on the Arctic. We focused on making the game engaging, by emphasizing interactivity. The board game format is well-suited for kids, because the short play sessions are able to hold their attention, while still teaching them about global warming. See images of our game in this deck of slides.

The rules of our board game are linked here. We generally modeled our game off of Candyland. In each round, the players were pregnant polar bears trying to gather enough food to survive the winter by collecting 8 seals before reaching the end of the game. There were 3 rounds overall that corresponded to the summers in 2012, 2014, and 2016 in the Bering sea. Our board featured two types of tiles: water and ice. The number of ice tiles decreased between rounds to symbolize the melting polar ice caps. Players rolled two dice to move, and drew a corresponding ice or water card. The ice cards generally gave better results than water cards (i.e. more likely to gain seals or experience other good events) since it’s easier for polar bears to hunt and survive on ice.

To give kids an idea of how melting Arctic ice connected to the rest of the world and generally educate them on fighting global warming in their daily lives, we also mixed in “fight global warming” cards into each deck. These cards had questions about global warming that all players had to work together to answer. If correct, players would either gain seals or add ice onto their board. A lot of time was spent calibrating the distributions of cards to make the game challenging yet still enjoyable.

Methodology/Data

Our data sources included NASA Arctic ice coverage data and many online articles about global warming, polar bears, arctic wildlife, and climate change.

We worked with NASA Arctic ice coverage data (csv) in order to correlate difficulty of our game with shrinking ice caps. We used ice cap data from summers in the Bering Sea in 2012, 2014, and 2016. Without needing to clean the dataset, we found that the amount of ice decreased 25% from 2012 to 2014 and 15% to 2014 to 2016.

The changes between each “round” of our board game were based on ice cap data. The depicted decrease in ice from 2012 to 2014 to 2016 is reflected in our game as users start off with all tiles as ice and must add water tiles in every round (reducing access to ice tiles). This affects game difficulty because ice tiles have more cards with positive consequences (such as +1 seal or +2 seal) than water tiles do. Our game started with 70 tiles of ice, which decreased to 54 and then 36 ice tiles.

We also pulled from online sources–ranging from news websites to advocacy groups websites to informational websites about animal habitats–to get facts on polar bears and global warming. With the intention of integrating these facts into our ice, water, and global warming cards as well as the rules of the game, we compiled a database of card content that can be seen in this spreadsheet, which includes citations and links to our data sources. This research affected our rules–we determined that users would need about 8 seals to survive per round based on the fact that pregnant polar bears need to 400 lbs of fat to survive the winter and each seal is on average 50 lbs.

Analyzing our Impact

Audience

Our audience is 11 – 14 year olds who like animals may have heard about the impact global warming has on animals, but have not really internalized its devastating impact and ways in which they can try to fight it. Our overall aim is to use the specific example of melting ice caps and polar bears to teach these youth about how global warming hurts the animals they care about.

Goals

Our goals can be broken down into short term, medium term and long term goals:

Short term:

• Players should recognize that global warming causes melting ice that impacts wildlife.
• Players know at least 3 ways you can fight global warming.

Medium term

• Players will tell their parents and/or friends about global warming.
• Players should believe that they can make a difference against global warming.

Long term

• Players will change their behavior to work against global warming (e.g. choosing eco-friendly transportation, reducing overconsumption and waste, etc.)

Play Testing

In order to evaluate the impact of our board game in promoting a fight against global warming and strong understanding of global warming’s impact on Arctic wildlife, we ran through one full gameplay session with three 7th grade kids from the local Cambridge area.

We found that these 7th graders had fun with the game–upon finishing the game, their immediate response was that they would play it again. However, we did notice that kids didn’t really read the facts that came along with every card in the game (drawn on each turn). Only one of the kids glanced at facts on cards.

However, another aspect of the game, adding water tiles in 3 successive rounds to model increasing difficulty over time, was effective, as one kid commented that they didn’t like water tiles because they made it harder to win, just as melting ice makes it harder for polar bears to hunt. Additionally, global warming cards that were meant to encourage the kids to engage with questions of global warming’s impact and the actions they can take, were harder than intended. This supports our game’s potential for impact in that these hard questions, although potentially discouraging, can really teach those that play the game. Play testing also revealed that, it’s a challenge to make kids consume information if it is optional to–even if the information has been integrated into a game as in ours.

Evaluation

In addition to analyzing the gameplay, we also asked our players some questions before the game and some questions after the game (see chart below for the Q & A).

We met short term goal of players understanding why global warming was bad for the animals in the Arctic, but we fell short in convincing them that effects on the Arctic changed the entire globe. This information is largely concentrated in the global warming cards, which the kids didn’t have a chance to really engage with given that they only played the game once. We also met medium term goal–all three kids said they would discuss global warming with friends and family. We must note that these kids were already predisposed to this since they were working on a sustainability project themselves. It’s too early to tell if the long term goal of the players changing their behavior to combat global warming has been or will be achieved.

Points to consider for future improvements are that players learned best through experience rather than words – so if there’s a lesson we want to drive home, we should build that into the win condition. While we initially thought the game should be collaborative, our test players insisted that the game would be much more fun if it were competitive.

 

BEFORE THE GAME
Question	Answer 1	Answer 2	Answer 3
What do you know about global warming and its impact on the Arctic?	Temp inc decreases and ice caps melt and less land for the polar bears	not much	will be in the water as the ice melts
Why do you think the Arctic matters?	animals live there and they can’t switch to a different environment
How do you think you can combat global warming? Do you do anything day-to-day?	unplug chargers	drive less, bike or walk	drive less, public transportation
AFTER THE GAME
One sentence – how did you feel about the game?	fun and can laugh at it	fun	fun
Is there anything that stuck out in particular?	ice cards are good	water cards are bad
How do you think you can combat global warming?	too arctic focused		learned stuff about global warming (mostly arctic related)
Do you think you’d talk to your friends and family about global warming?	yes	yes	yes
Would you play this game again? And if so, with who	would play with their friends	would play with their friends	would play with their friends

 

-what data is being shown

The data show the occupations by share in the architecture and related services.

-who you think the audience is

The audience are architects, people who have the related jobs, people who are interested in the architecture and related services, people who study the structure of the architecture related occupations, and people who want to start business related to architecture etc.

-what you think the goals of the data presentation are

The goal of this map is to show there are many related services of architecture, and what are the Percentage of those services in the industry chain. Secondly, the map creator also categories the occupations by management, business, science and art; Sales and office occupations; Service occupations; production, transportation and material moving occupations; natural resources, construction and maintenance occupations; Military specific occupations. In addition, the complicated map indicate the innate association of one occupation with another.

-whether you think it is effective or not and why

It is very effective in terms of showing the percentages of each occupation take in the whole industry. And the category is very clear. It is very helpful to understand the relationships and thus better refine this architecture related industry. It is also good that the audience could click on each occupation to see the population and the salaries. However, I find some of the information are too small to read. In addition, I could not understand the logic of how the map creator associate one occupation with another and why the order of the occupations are like these.

https://datausa.io/profile/cip/0406/