- Interactive classroom game about sustainability, politics, and future scenarios
- Students take on political roles and make decisions about budgets and policy measures
- Digital simulation shows the consequences of their decisions over the next decades
In collaboration with oekom Verlag, we designed and developed the digital simulation for Parlament der Zukunft: A hybrid educational game that puts students in the role of political decision-makers and lets them experience the long-term consequences of their choices.
The Challenge
How can complex connections between climate change, poverty, equality, food, and energy become tangible and understandable for students?
Parlament der Zukunft was designed to go beyond simply presenting information. Instead, students should make decisions themselves and experience their consequences.
The foundation for this experience was an existing scientific data model based on the Earth4All framework. The model contains more than 2,000 formulas that describe complex relationships between social, economic, and environmental factors and calculate how different political measures affect these indicators over time.
Running all of these calculations directly during a classroom session would take too long for the results to be shown immediately. We therefore had to rework and optimize the underlying model so that its calculations could be performed and the results loaded in real time.
This created a second challenge: translating the complexity of the model into an accessible experience for an entire classroom. The digital components had to support a structured game flow and enable large groups of students to participate actively, while still preserving the face-to-face nature of the role-playing game.
The challenge was therefore not only to make a complex scientific model understandable, but to make it playable, responsive, and usable in a real classroom setting.
Our Approach
We were provided with a data model based on the Earth4All framework, developed to simulate how different political measures can affect social, economic, and environmental indicators over time. Our task was to turn this complex model into a playable experience.
The model needed to be translated into meaningful player decisions, connecting each ministry’s choices to the underlying simulation. Students can allocate budgets to measures such as renewable energy, education, wealth taxation, or regenerative agriculture and see how their decisions affect wellbeing, CO₂ emissions, budgets, and other indicators over several decades.
We built a digital game interface to collect and process these decisions and visualize their consequences. A presentation mode supports the facilitator during the decision rounds, while videos introduce the regions and key concepts throughout the game.
The Impact
The result is a digital role-playing game designed for entire school classes. Students join the game by scanning a QR code on their phone or tablet and take on different political roles. They discuss their options, submit their decisions through the app, and see the results together on the digital presentation board.
The system turns a complex set of data and interactions into a clear game loop: make decisions, see the consequences, discuss the results, and make new decisions.
This makes topics such as climate change, inequality, energy, and sustainable development more tangible. The students are encouraged to work together, weigh trade-offs, and experience the consequences of political decisions themselves.
