Curricular Content

The Future Worlds curriculum emphasizes developing an age-appropriate understanding of the relationships between specific conservation decisions, energy use, human health, and population growth within Earth’s ecosystem. It also features contemporary socio-scientific issues, including climate change, alternative energies, and sustainability. Key messages for learners include: (a) rapid increases in human population and consumption of natural resources impact Earth’s systems; (b) human activities in agriculture, industry, and everyday life have major effects on the land, air, vegetation, streams, oceans, and biodiversity; and (c) individuals and communities can do things to minimize humans’ impact on the environment and help protect Earth’s resources and environments. Future Worlds’ design encourages learners to uncover cause-and-effect relationships made visible through their decisions in the game’s simulated virtual environment, emphasizing mechanism and explanation as well as systems and system models, all fundamental cross-cutting concepts in the Next Generation Science Standards (NGSS Lead States, 2013).

Informed by the National Resource Center’s Learning Science in Informal Environments: People, Places, and Pursuits report, Future Worlds has been designed to engage learners in six interrelated strands of science education:

• Experience excitement, interest, and motivation to learn about phenomena in the natural and physical world.

• Come to generate, understand, remember, and use concepts, explanations, arguments, models, and facts related to science.

• Manipulate, test, explore, predict, question, observe, and make sense of the natural and physical world.

• Reflect on science as a way of knowing; on processes, concepts, and institutions of science; and on their own process of learning about phenomena.

• Participate in scientific activities and learning practices with others, using scientific language and tools.

• Think about themselves as science learners and develop an identity as someone who knows about, uses, and sometimes contributes to science.

With these higher-order learning goals as its focus, Future Worlds is designed to actively engage learners and help them make observations and conduct investigations to build an understanding of environmental sustainability. Future Worlds emphasizes that humans are part of the environment and, by linking learners to a specific environment, stress the fact that humans are in a mutually sustaining interrelationship with the environment and its natural resources. A core take-home message for the learners is the central “belonging” concept: each of us is part of the environment and the decisions we make and the actions we take have both immediate and long-term impacts on the environment.