Outreach

Habitable

Since 2022, I have been part of the Habitable team, an international team consisting of students and postdocs, that developped a board game with the same name. In 2023, we were one of the 15 teams that was awarded €10000 as part of the Hochschulwettbewerb, a Germany-wide science outreach competition from the German Federal Ministry of Education and Research. With this funding, we were abe to develop our board game Habitable, organise multiple playtest events, hire a student worker to develop an online version of the game, get a professional design for the board game, and get it professionally printed.

In Habitable, you start out with one or more planets around a variety of different stars, and you try to make these planets habitable by changing their temperature, water content, magnetic field, and orbit around their host star. Once a planet has life, the goal is to keep the planet habitable and sustain life for as long as possible. With Habitable, we want to get the player excited for astrophysics and exoplanetary science, while simultaneoulsy drawing the important analogy with our own planet Earth and its habitability in the midsts of the current climate crisis.

The Habitable team with the professionaly printed copies of the Habitable board game. © Marisa de Sà Almeida.

The professionally printed version of the Habitable board game during our latest event. © Marisa de Sà Almeida.