Communication of science to non-scientific audience: VGAS - exploration of energy, lifestyles and climate

V GAS© aims at making the connections between individual lifestyles and greenhouse gas emissions, gauging personal contributions to global emissions. Games concepts of design helped defining V GAS© functionalities (in order to ease discovering of information, making relations, challenge, questioning and eventually help with individual and social learning). Since, V GAS© gives an illustration of environmental and social issues, demonstrating different dimensions, scales and perspectives of the climate change problematique, it aims at stimulating self-reflection, discussion and possible negotiation to enhance the relations with the rest of the community, trying to promote awareness and responsibility among citizens and grounds for personal decisional power and social learning. Convivial Social Learning TooLs (CSLoTs) is the name we gave to Information & Communication Technology (ICT) based tools purposefully developed for learning initiatives in public settings about issues that concern society. They are not educational tools in the sense that they are not a one-way learning opportunity. They are meant to social learning, meaning that those engaged in a situation where they are deployed are all learners from each others walks of life. The issue of quality was of most relevance since V GAS© follows the principles of conveying scientific information to non-scientific audiences. In order to assure the Quality of the prototype, V GAS© underwent several phases of quality assurance by setting up ‘tuning contexts’, which are forums where appropriate debate over the design of ICT can be developed and documented. This paper describes the developed tool, methodologies to assure the Quality of these types of tools, and the conclusions from the Quality Assurance process.

DE SOUSA BRILHANTE PEDROSA Tiago;  MARTINHO GUIMARAES PIRES PEREIRA Angela; 

2006-11-03

Interscience Publishers

JRC31581