While household energy management is traditionally an adult-centric activity, we believe the children can play a productive role in helping their families move toward more sustainable ways of living. Green Home Games creates playful activities—like board games—designed to include the whole family to learn about energy consumption in homes
Green Home Games is a National Science Foundation-funded research project focused on leveraging common and fun family practices to increase whole family learning about energy use in the home and encourage more sustainable home practices. Dr. Pryce Davis of LSRI is a collaborator on this project with principal investigators Michael Horn and Reed Stevens of Northwestern University.
The project is responsible to two award winning games. Turn Up the Heat! is the world’s first thermostat board game designed to help parents and children think about trade-offs related to comfort, energy, and environmental sustainability. Energy Monsters is a playful horror game designed to scaffold interactions between family members and encourage conversations about electricity consumption and waste.
Sample papers:
Horn, M. S., Banerjee, A., Davis, P., & Stevens, R. (2016). Invasion of the Energy Monsters: A Spooky Game About Saving Energy. In Games+ Learning+ Society Conference 12. First Place Showcase Award
Banerjee, A., Horn, M. S., & Davis, P. (2016, May). Invasion of the energy monsters: a family board game about energy consumption. In Proceedings of the 2016 CHI Conference Extended Abstracts on Human Factors in Computing Systems (pp. 1828-1834). ACM. Best Paper Honorable Mention