This interactive game about flooding has students evaluate situations, make decisions, gather information, and write news articles about a flooding event in a fictional town.
The site includes a teacher's guide, standards, and suggestions for connecting it to various subjects or lessons.
Teaching Tips
Positives
Students can save their progress, making it easier to incorporate into assignments or class periods.
Students will interview experts and virtually interact with citizens, helping them understand the environmental and social impacts of floods.
Additional Prerequisites
Students will need access to a device and the Internet for this game.
The game may take some students longer than others to complete. Consider having checkpoints or breaking up the game into stages.
Differentiation
Try grouping students in pairs and have them take turns making the choices.
There are a number of connections and extensions listed in the Teacher Guide that can help you use this game in a social studies, science, or language arts class.
This game may help students understand the importance of media literacy and investigative journalism. Have students research other news articles to see if they include citations for their information.
Science classes can connect this game to lessons about permeability, the water cycle, wetlands, and water quality.
Engineering classes can use this game to highlight the importance of integrating ecology into urban planning and design.
Scientist Notes
This resource from the Wisconsin Center for Education Research at the University of Wisconsin – Madison is an interactive game where students play as a young reporter covering a flood in the fictional town of Twin Lakes. Throughout, students are faced with a variety of challenges, from time management to preparation, to earning the trust of townspeople. This resource beautifully uses the process of researching for newspaper stories to teach students about both journalism and the physical and social science aspects of flooding. Through the four stories, students are tasked with writing text as they gain more and more knowledge on the causes of flooding. This resource is fun, informative, and is recommended for teaching.
Standards
Next Generation Science Standards (NGSS)
ESS3: Earth and Human Activity
MS-ESS3-2 Analyze and interpret data on natural hazards to forecast future catastrophic events and inform the development of technologies to mitigate their effects.
ETS1: Engineering Design
HS-ETS1-3 Evaluate a solution to a complex real-world problem based on prioritized criteria and trade-offs that account for a range of constraints, including cost, safety, reliability, and aesthetics, as well as possible social, cultural, and environmental impacts.
College, Career, and Civic Life (C3) Standards
Dimension 3: Developing Claims and Using Evidence
D3.3.6-8 Identify evidence that draws information from multiple sources to support claims, noting evidentiary limitations.
Dimension 3: Gathering and Evaluating Sources
D3.1.9-12 Gather relevant information from multiple sources representing a wide range of views while using the origin, authority, structure, context, and corroborative value of the sources to guide the selection.
Common Core English Language Arts Standards (CCSS.ELA)
Reading: History/Social Studies (6-12)
CCSS.ELA-LITERACY.RH.6-8.5 Describe how a text presents information (e.g., sequentially, comparatively, causally).
Reading: Science & Technical Subjects (6-12)
CCSS.ELA-LITERACY.RST.6-8.6 Analyze the author's purpose in providing an explanation, describing a procedure, or discussing an experiment in a text.
