VisualSchools - Visualization of energy consumption and energy production in schools

The Contract (www.kontrakten.net) is an energy advisor game targeted secondary schools. It offers a genuine possibility to investigate the school as an energy consuming building. The plot of the game is to register a number of factors, make inventions and thereby earn money and points to improve the energy consumption of the school building. The students work as 4 businesses that must come up with the best possible energy savings plan for their school to win the Contract of energy improving all schools in their county. They can make improvements only after investigating a given area in their school. Thereby they are forced to understand complex energy-related problems and building specifics in order to fulfill their aim to create the best possible energy reality in their school building. The inventions are based on science exercises designed specially for this project. Many of the exercises have calculations that enable the students to understand the context that a given technology is embedded into. Numbers used in the game are primarily accurate and reflects reality, but in a few cases values and numbers have been adapted to the game reality to ensure that the general message is not disturbed by technicalities that are not in themselves relevant to the game context. By learning intensively about buildings and energy consumption, it is the expectation that learned points are it is possible to transfer the learned points to home context, thereby inspiring young people to engage in energy auditing their own homes as well. The game is integrated in The Climate trail travelling around all Danish communities as one of 13 activities. It has been adopted by local communities as compulsory for all secondary schools, which makes the expected utilization very high. The game has been suggested for local adaptation in the IEE project proposal 4Energy which has been submitted for the 2007 call for proposals for Intelligent Energy Actions.