Fierce planet : sustainability learning through gaming and simulation

Fierce Planet is an experimental agent-based modelling (ABM) platform for developing and testing urban sustainability scenarios. Developed as part of the Sustainable Urban Precincts Program initiative to incorporate sustainability concepts into learning and teaching across the curriculum at RMIT University, the platform is designed to facilitate teaching of sustainability concepts, theories and problems in tertiary courses. This discussion paper introduces agent-based models and their application to the social and environmental sciences. We then outline how we develop a series of such models to represent historical and present understandings of sustainability commonly taught in tertiary courses. In particular we consider the pedagogical advantages of ABMs as a graphical representation of the progressive complexity of sustainability models" enabling students to visualise the movement from simple Malthusian models containing two to four variables, through to the more complex "Limits to Growth" model containing eight variables, and beyond. This increase in modelling complexity is significant, not only in understanding contemporary sustainability challenges" both popular and academic literatures on climate change feature considerable debate about the construction and interpretation of mathematical models for example" but also in thinking through associated questions about the increasing role of modelling and simulation in rhetoric and argument. We discuss how ABMs represent a comparatively recent approach to treat this problem through graphical animation rather than textual or mathematical representation, and outline a pilot research design to evaluate how this approach might elucidate otherwise complex sustainability theoretical literature in a classroom context.