Biodiversity Games - Canopy Collective

Introduction

Games are powerful tools that help explain complex ideas like climate change and wildlife conservation while sparking curiosity and learning! Through our innovative approach, we’re spreading awareness about topics such as forests, birds, and human-animal conflict in Northeast India. Join us as we explore new ways to connect people with nature and foster a deeper love for our planet!

About us

This team is on a mission to make biodiversity education fun, interactive, and accessible through experiential games. Canopy collective is a group of very passionate individuals and organizations working in northeast India. Our platform will empower a new wave of conservation leaders towards ethical nature conservation.
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It has the goal of transforming the field of nature conservation by ground up partnerships at the intersection of art, science, and action. When working across disciplines/themes, we recognize that biodiversity conservation is equally a call to action that involves transdisciplinary partnerships. More importantly, with diverse groups of people, we want to intentionally hold the realities of pluralism and diversity in our work.

What we plan to achieve

This working group in Canopy Collective envisions to popularize biodiversity games in the nature education and wildlife conservation in Northeast India. It has been seen that nature educators in the northeast often lack educational training opportunities. We aim to utilize tools to facilitate discussions about biodiversity relevant to the Northeast context. Instead of only doing a few tree and bird walks, we want to have games related to them. The biodiversity games will be place based for the northeast and carry instructions with them that will also be translated in the local languages.
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These games will also be used by conservationists, youth leaders, forest department staff, environmental and ecology students or any researcher who wants to be a practitioner. In future, we want to build a network of facilitators in the North East, that by using biodiversity games, can be training the trainers and teachers of nature learning.

Our Impact

Growing the movement

We hope to use and collect all the materials for the project along with additional games and build a repository for games in the Northeast. This in the long term is actually going to be made available for all people/ researchers working in our project sites to borrow and use. Outcomes of the workshops include learners, learning these games and then spreading these games to their field sites. These learners are the youth leaders and young adults as well as older people. Regions of impact are Assam, Arunachal Pradesh and Nagaland.

Join Us

How can you be involved?

If you have games related to biodiversity please reach out to us. If you plan to build a game related to biodiversity, conservation, nature education, climate change and human-animal conflict please reach out to us. If you are interested in volunteering with us, please write to us.

SUbject line: Biodiversity Games

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TEAM

People behind the project

Uddipana Kalita

Project Lead

Uddipana Is a wildlife biologist and conservationist by training. She has experience in nature education and managing education programs.

Peeyush Sekhsaria

Architect and Nature Educator

Peeyush is a bird enthusiast who provides us with different biodiversity games. He is responsible for the games and resources for all those involved in the group.

Arundhati Venkat

Design Intern

Arundhati is our design intern. She is a 3rd year, graphic design student and an avid nature and wildlife enthusiast.

Sambita Modak

Game/Interactive Art creator

Sambita is an ecologist who creates games and interactive media for nature education and conservation outreach. She also teaches and mentors science-art projects. She holds a PhD from the Indian Institute of Science.