Carbonopoly: a new way to learn by playing

by Anna de Polo

A new board game, Carbonopoly, is coming from Sweden; it is based on the concepts of energy, environment and sustainable development and it reinvents, in environmentally key, the more famous Monopoly. Created by Patrik Larsson, a student of the KTH, The Royal Institute of Technology of Stockholm, Carbonopoly was designed for schoolchildren as a form of active learning, complementary of the textbooks, but it can be played also in family.

The idea is to let the new generations know the problem of energy and climate-smart investments in a fun but effective way. «The purpose of the game -Patrik Larsson says- is not to judge or point in any specific direction regarding the usage of different energy sources, but rather to highlight and bring forward the discussion. It is also important to state Larsson adds, that the primary target group for the game is younger people. I think it is very important that they form their own opinion about what is happening in the energy debate».

The game has been tested and refined in the autumn of 2009 in cooperation with the House of Science, the Royal Academy of Sciences and some schools in the Stockholm area, and it will be evaluated on a larger scale in spring 2010. «We are starting a new engineering program, Energy and Environment, in the autumn of 2010 -said Per Lundqvist- professor of the Energy Department of the Stockholm University. “We believe in this kind of learning as a supplement to more traditional teaching».

Carbonopoly works in a similar way to the traditional Monopoly, but, instead of buying streets and edifying houses and hotels, you built power plants and city districts. There are seven kinds of plants that use different energy sources: coal, oil, uranium, wind, water, solar energy and nuclear fusion energy. The investment costs change from a kind of energy to another, as well as the profits, that can be invested in building neighbourhoods and in the development of transport system. You can buy bus and train lines and than make the fellow players pay a fee when they use it. The money used by the players is the fictitious currency E; if a player runs out the money, he can resell, at half of its value, some of his districts or plants, which in this way return to the “State” and can be purchased again by other players. There are also opportunity-cards, which allow the players to win new neighbourhoods, and question-cards, which contain 300 questions about energy, environment and sustainable development. In this way the children during the game become familiar with words like emission permits, climate investments, wind or wave energy etc., concepts that they will meet in their daily life and they will be able to better understand, getting a greater environmental awareness.

In the end the winner is the one that achieves the highest profit. This is not achieved by investing in oil and wildly cementing around the gaming table, but through “clean” energy sources and sustainable investments. «In fact -as explained by Larsson himself- in Carbonopoly investing in coal or oil is combined with other additional costs such as emission trading systems and lower payback» so it is not convenient. However the fact remains that even in a board game designed to educate the new generations the moral of the story is “wins more money”.