Climate Quiz - A Facebook game for measuring environmental knowledge
With more than 800 million monthly active users, the Facebook platform bears significant potential for scientific projects. A team of scientists in Austria has tapped into this potential with a social media application to collect information on climate change awareness and the users’ knowledge about the underlying processes. Players face two types of challenges to increase their score: selecting correct relations between two environmental concepts, and answering climate change related questions.
The Climate Quiz invites Facebook users and their online friends to evaluate whether two concepts presented by the system are related (e.g. “climate change”, “ecosystem”), and which label is most appropriate to describe this relation (e.g. “threatens”). Participants earn points for matching answers, but can also lose them if their opinions differ from the majority of other players. The built-in notification system and real-time progress statistics help engage Facebook users and leverage the wisdom of the crowds for scientific purposes.
The game with a purpose is part of the Climate Change Collaboratory, a research project to strengthen the relations between environmental stakeholders who recognize the need for climate change adaptation and mitigation, but differ in their specific goals and agendas. It not only develops innovative survey instruments such as the Climate Quiz to create shared meaning and build domain models, but also investigates the communicative strategies of the various stakeholders. Thereby, the collaboratory aims to unearth hidden assumptions and misconceptions about climate change, contribute to a mutual understanding of existing problems, and suggest priorities for research and policy development.
The Climate Change Collaboratory is funded by the Austrian Climate and Energy Fund within the program line ACRP (Austrian Climate Research Program). The project partners include MODUL University Vienna (Department of New Media Technology and Department of Public Governance and Management), the Vienna University of Economics and Business (Research Institute for Computational Methods), the University of Graz (Wegener Center for Climate and Global Change), and the European Support Centre of the Club of Rome.
