November 8th is National STEM Day! To promote and celebrate STEM, we are sharing highlights of our game design incubator with Field Day Labs.
How do you teach middle school students about invisible threats like indoor air pollution, volatile organic compounds, or particulate matter? The answer might surprise you: through STEM games.
Last month, we brought together educators, environmental health researchers, and game designers from Field Day Labs at UW-Madison for a full-day game design incubator. Our mission was ambitious yet clear: develop game concepts that could empower students to understand environmental health risks and take meaningful action in their own lives.
The Challenge: Making Environmental Health Literacy Engaging
Environmental health literacy goes beyond simple awareness. It requires students to:
- Understand how environmental exposures affect health
- Identify and assess environmental risks in their daily lives
- Evaluate ways to reduce harm
- Communicate solutions that can be implemented
These are complex, interconnected concepts. Indoor air quality—the focus of our game design work—is particularly challenging because the risks are often invisible and the science involves dynamic systems with multiple variables. Students need to grasp how sources (like cooking, smoking, or off-gassing materials), interventions (like ventilation or air purifiers), and outcomes all interact in real-time.
Traditional educational approaches often struggle to make these abstract concepts tangible. That’s where games come in.
The Field Day Approach: STEM Games as Apprenticeships at Scale
Field Day Labs has pioneered an approach to educational game design grounded in learning science, particularly the theory of situated cognition. As their team explained during the incubator, everything we learn is inseparable from its context—the activity, setting, and feedback loops all shape how we learn.
The ideal learning environment? An apprenticeship, where learners experience authentic practices with expert guidance and immediate feedback. But apprenticeships don’t scale to serve every student in every classroom.
STEM games, however, can approximate this ideal. They can:
- Simulate complex systems where students see cause-and-effect relationships unfold
- Create authentic roles where students practice real professional skills
- Generate meaningful feedback that helps students refine their understanding
- Scaffold complexity so students can gradually build sophisticated mental models
The key insight from Field Day: successful educational games focus on either dynamic systems (understanding how things work through simulation) or expert practices (understanding roles through authentic activities), or ideally both.
The Design Process: Interview, Identify, Iterate
Our incubator began with an introduction to the research by the S3E Co-PI, Dr. Neil Klepeis, who shared real-world research examples:
- Measuring secondhand smoke exposure in cars
- Using real-time feedback to change behavior around residential air quality
- Detecting vaping in school bathrooms through air quality monitoring
These stories grounded our design work in authentic professional practices and real measurement techniques. The group learned about the tools researchers use, the data they collect, and how they model exposure and health outcomes.
Next came the crucial brainstorming phase. Working in teams with educators from area schools, we explored game concepts across four contexts:
- Family homes – Where students could investigate everyday pollution sources
- Schools – Where students could address shared environmental challenges
- Workplaces – Where students could understand occupational health
- Neighborhoods – Where students could tackle community-scale issues
Each setting offered unique opportunities for students to take on investigative roles, collect data, build models, and develop advocacy skills.
Design Principles That Emerged
Throughout the incubator, several key principles emerged for creating effective environmental health games:
1. Ground Games in Real Science
Unlike many educational games, our designs incorporate scientifically accurate simulations. When students adjust a variable—opening a window, turning on an air purifier, or introducing a pollution source—the game should respond with realistic outcomes based on actual environmental modeling. This authenticity helps students extrapolate from gameplay to their real lives.
2. Make the Invisible Visible
Indoor air pollution is invisible to the naked eye. Games can use visual representations, meters, and feedback systems to make these hidden risks tangible. Students can “see” particulate matter accumulate, watch pollutant concentrations change over time, and observe health impacts unfold.
3. Emphasize Inquiry and Investigation
Rather than delivering information, games should engage students in scientific inquiry. Give them tools to measure, hypotheses to test, and problems to solve. Let them discover relationships through experimentation.
4. Include an Action Component
Environmental health literacy isn’t just about knowledge—it’s about empowerment. Games should help students translate their understanding into real-world action, whether that’s conversations with family members, advocacy in their schools, or changes in their own behaviors.
5. Avoid “Chocolate-Covered Broccoli”
This was Field Day’s memorable warning: don’t just slap educational content onto game mechanics. The learning should emerge naturally from authentic gameplay, not feel like a quiz or fact dump disguised as fun.
What We Learned About Environmental Health Literacy
The incubator reinforced several important insights about STEM and environmental health education:
Context matters immensely. Students are more likely to engage with environmental health when it’s framed around their specific circumstances—their homes, schools, and communities. Generic awareness campaigns fall flat; specific, relevant scenarios resonate.
Youth spend 80-90% of their time indoors. This makes indoor air quality especially relevant to their lived experience, yet it’s often overlooked in environmental education, which tends to focus on outdoor pollution or wilderness conservation.
Young people want to help others. Our earlier research showed that middle school students prefer games where they can solve problems affecting families or communities, not just abstract challenges. They want roles as investigators, problem-solvers, and advocates.
Scientific modeling is accessible. With the right tools and scaffolding, middle school students can build sophisticated models of environmental systems. They can understand relationships between variables, test interventions, and predict outcomes.
Moving Forward: From Concepts to Playable Prototypes
The game concepts generated during our incubator are now being developed into formal design documents. Field Day’s team will create one-pager summaries that capture the most promising ideas, which will inform the next phase of development.
Our goal is to create a game that meets Next Generation Science Standards, engages students authentically, and genuinely improves environmental health literacy. The incubator showed us that this is achievable—when researchers, educators, and game designers collaborate, when we ground our work in learning science, and when we resist the temptation to simplify complex systems into shallow activities.
The Bigger Picture: Why This Matters
Games are already where young people are spending their time and attention. The gaming industry generates more revenue than movies and sports combined. More young people watch others play games online than watch traditional sports broadcasts.
Rather than lamenting this reality or trying to pull students away from games, we can meet them where they are. Just as Sesame Street and Mr. Rogers’ Neighborhood transformed television into an educational medium, thoughtfully designed games can become powerful tools for scientific literacy.
Environmental health challenges—from climate change to pollution to emerging contaminants—require a generation that understands complex systems, thinks critically about evidence, and feels empowered to advocate for change. STEM games can help build that generation.
Inspiration to Move Forward
Our STEM game design incubator with Field Day Labs demonstrated that creating effective educational games requires more than technical skill—it demands deep collaboration across disciplines. Environmental health researchers bring scientific accuracy and real-world relevance. Educators bring classroom insight and curricular expertise. Game designers bring an understanding of play, engagement, and learning mechanics.
When these perspectives converge, we can create experiences that are simultaneously rigorous, engaging, and transformative.
The games we’re developing won’t just teach facts about indoor air quality. They’ll give students tools to investigate their own environments, models to understand complex exposures, and confidence to communicate solutions. They’ll turn abstract health risks into concrete, addressable challenges.
That’s the promise of game-based learning done right: not chocolate-covered broccoli, but genuine play that happens to teach something profound.
Special thanks to David Gagnon and the entire Field Day Labs team, to the educators who brought their classroom expertise, to Dr. Jonathon Patz, an environmental health research expert from the University of Wisconsin, and to the National Institute of Environmental Health Sciences for supporting this work through the Small Business Innovation Research program.
About the Project
This game design work is part of a larger research project funded by the National Institutes of Health to develop and evaluate S3E (Simulation for Environmental Exposure Education), a mobile serious game to improve environmental health literacy among middle school students, Co-PIs, Tamara Kuhn, CEO of dfusion and Dr. Neil Klepeis, CEO of Clyr.