Fifth meeting
Autor: Gustavo Souza | Publicado: 2015-07-09T17:32:00-07:00



If you had played Trace Effects, you probably notice that the 4th chapter of Trace Effects is all about environment and
how we should behave to keep living in planet Earth. In the initial presentation,
the park ranger says to Trace to think about reuse, reduce and recycle. That’s
how the objectives are organized during the chapter.



Trace
convinces the Walkers to recycle water bottles, Sidney to reuse her ecobag and
Zeck to ask his boss to reduce the amount of printed newspapers. Decades ago
that’s was called the 3R (reuse, reduce and recycle). Now days some people
suggest 4 and even 6, like repair, rationalize and recuse.


Based on the
same concern, some companies and public institutions try to create actions showing
their values, like the local university.









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<![endif]--><!--[if !vml]--><!--[endif]-->Unfortunately, most part of time, those actions
are not so effective. In 2013, when Ufac was trying to implement selective
collection and I was studying environmental education, I took some pictures.
Not only of the recycle bin, but also what we could find inside and around it.




Yellow bin. Metal, not plastic and paper.





Blue bin. Paper, dry paper only.



What I saw
in that moment makes me think of how people can be so lazy? Although I also
noticed that without a good educational system providing information and making
possible to construct knowledge, people may not be able to the right things.



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<![endif]--><!--[if !vml]--><!--[endif]-->In Trace we can explore this aspects of live.
For example, when he knows Brooke. In that moment, the players could be
learning how to be active in process of recycling and throw away trash in the
right bin. However, did you notice something wrong?




In the game food is thrown in the red bin, but in the comics Trace gives them a red one for plastic bottles.







Those colors are a convetion, so they are the same in many countries.




So, gosh, I
can’t use that game in my classroom.



Well, there
3 ways to think about that problem. 1. It is terrible, I’m not going to use it with
my students. 2. Ok, I’m going to use it, they are not going to notice, anyway.
And 3, that’s my favorite one: I can use the game and make them think about it.



Just
like creating laws to arrest people without previous education about how much
damage alcohol, nicotine and tetrahydrocannabinol cause doesn’t work, there is
no sense in expecting people to recycle residues if they hadn’t been previously
educated.





This
process must be filled with significant situations and comprehensive inputs,
like an unseen problem in a game. When you show it and tell a story or even
histories, you turn everything more interesting and that's our first ability to
discuss: to fib.