Serious Games for Empowering Teenagers: A STEAM Approach to Climate Change Reflection and Communication

As a wide-ranging societal challenge characterised by complexity and uncertainty, confronting the problem of climate change can be an overwhelming experience for teenagers too young to vote, but too old not to care about the altered world of their inheritance. Consequently, some become activists, more disengaged, yet others become despondent in the face of this formidable predicament. This chapter responds to the needs of this cohort and their teachers by showcasing a design-thinking focused, transdisciplinary, pedagogical framework to enhance the climate change knowledge and communication skills of mature minors (14-17 years old). Coalescing around the co-design of a climate change adaptation game ‘by’ teenagers ‘for’ teenagers, the chapter describes a process-centred, self-paced STEAM pedagogy of problem solving. Drawing from a nationally funded work research project and illustrated via a case study, the chapter describes a replicable series of innovative pedagogical methods for stimulating collective creativity in resolving complicated climate change issues. The chapter will be of interest to educators and youth workers seeking to improve the engagement of teenagers with climate change, enrich the experience of those already interested in the topic, and reduce the sense of anxiety some may feel regarding the seemingly insuperable challenge left to their generation.