[Hurricane Katrina: Tempest in Crescent City]

Hello,
  I’m writing to let you know about a new game from Global Kids’ Playing 4 Keeps program, Hurricane Katrina: Tempest in Crescent City. During the 2007-2008 school year, three adult trainers worked with a group of high school students to learn about global issues through game-based learning, study game design fundamentals, and develop a serious game about Hurricane Katrina.

You can see the game for yourself at http://www.tempestincrescentcity.org. We'd love to get feedback on the game and see someone write a review.

The students collaborated with game developers Gamepill to turn the students’ game design into a finished product. The web-based game recognizes local heroes that emerged during the disaster while educating its players about the essentials of disaster readiness.

Tempest is a side-scrolling platform game set in New Orleans during the Hurricane Katrina Disaster of 2005. The game's main character is Vivica Waters, a young woman from New Orleans who moved to New York after surviving the storm. The game takes place in a dream Vivica has where she searches for her mother and helps her neighbors as the hero she wishes she could have been.

Tempest is meant to be a fun adventure game that also addresses meaningful, accurate and difficult historical situations.

There are three main educational goals for the game:

    * Teach players about how everyday residents of New Orleans acted heroically to help each other. This is a celebration of New Orleans residents and their culture.
    * Emphasize what are perhaps the two most important priorities in any disaster: communication and use of local resources, needs, and knowledge. The relief effort in Hurricane Katrina was severely hampered by the poor communication between government agencies and through most media outlets. Top down disaster management also led responders to ignore local resources and knowledge that could have saved many lives. Even in the aftermath, local needs and wishes are largely being ignored during rebuilding.
    * Draw attention to the continuing struggle in New Orleans as residents fight for housing in 2008. The city was destroyed by negligence, and, unfortunately, it is now being rebuilt without homes for many of its most loyal residents.

In September, Tempest was awarded an Editor’s Choice Award from the Children’s Technology review.

The game is one part of a comprehensive social networking website where players are encouraged to act in support of New Orleans residents.  The site provides links to a variety of relief groups as well as information about New Orleans and Hurricane Katrina including multiple timelines, analysis of media coverage, and supporting articles for all information presented. The site also features multiple curricula about Hurricane Katrina including Global Kids’ own workshops for teachers to use as educational tools. Finally, visitors who join the site become part of a social online community and contribute to forums about Hurricane Katrina, New Orleans, and the continuing reconstruction

To learn more about Global Kids, visit http://www.globalkids.org


Thanks for your time, and feel free to contact me if you have any further questions.


Best,
  Jay Bachhuber