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Success Translating & Playing the World Climate Exercise in Spanish

May 31, 2013 by Ellie Johnston

Through simulating the UN climate negotiations, the World Climate Exercise has opened the minds of thousands to the challenges and opportunities to addressing climate change. Now this game is available in Spanish, thanks to the hard work of the Latin American Systems Society Chapter, who translated the materials. This brings the languages the World Climate materials are available in to five — English, French, German, Chinese, and Spanish.

Leading the Spanish translation effort was Eduardo Fracassi of Instituto Tecnológico de Buenos Aires. Eduardo recently shared his successful experience capturing his students’ interest in climate change through running World Climate in class.

Hi Ellie,

We are very happy to tell you that this morning we successfully concluded our first World Climate Simulation Workshop!!!

We used the role playing excercise at UCES (www.uces.edu.ar) for a Public Relations course on Systems Thinking that I regularly teach with Fabian Szulanski, as an example of the famous “tragedy of the commons” systems archetype.

Students were very moved. Some students asked: “Are these data real?” And when we told them that they are the most accurate representation that we have available up to now, their response was: “why is it that nothing has been done up to now?”

At the end of the exercise we suggested students taking a small personal compromise towards mitigating global climate change. The group was a small one, 9 - 19 students participated but it served as a first test case.

We will repeat the role playing exercise as a regular part of the Systems Thinking  course all year around at UCES, these are a limited quantity of students, but UCES has more than 10,000 students overall, so we are planning to make the workshop an university wide affair, but that may take some time and perhaps some careers might not be interested…

We have filmed the exercise and I plan to start editing the video this afternoon. We are no experts at filmmaking, but we will do our best with the available tools and expertise at hand. We will repeat the exercise next week, perhaps we will get better footage!

We are also planning to repeat the role playing world climate simulation at ITBA (itba.edu.ar) and other leading universities in Buenos Aires.

I copy this email to Gloria Pérez Salazar from ITESM and the Latin American Systems Society Chapter which helped us so much with the translations.

Thanks again for all your support and confidence!

Cheers,

Eduardo Fracassi ITBA - Instituto Tecnológico de Buenos Aires

Eduardo took pictures and wrote a story narrative to illustrate the drama that unfolded in his World Climate Exercise. Check it out: climate negotiation workshop story (pdf)

And be sure to take a look at this video of the exercise:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=lotdkbxlRZw

We don’t ask for much in return for the free tools we offer, but we do appreciate your stories about running World Climate and using our tools. If you’ve put our tools to use, could you send us feedback on your experience? Send me an email at info@climateinteractive.org.