Climate change is one of the most pressing challenges of our time, yet its complexity often makes it difficult to teach in an engaging way. A team of BCIT Computer Systems Technology (CST) students is aiming to change that with an innovative capstone project: Turn The Tides, an interactive educational game designed to help young adults understand the far-reaching implications of climate change.
Turn The Tides: Making climate education engaging
Traditional classroom methods don’t always convey the geopolitical, economic, and environmental dimensions of climate change. Turn The Tides seeks to bridge that gap by placing players at the center of these challenges. Through immersive gameplay, users experience firsthand how decisions about energy, infrastructure, and environmental policy can impact global ecosystems over time.
“Our goal is to make climate education approachable and interactive,” the team explains. “By simulating real-world scenarios, players can visualize the consequences of their actions and develop a deeper understanding of the complexities involved.”
A layered approach to gameplay
During their fall final term, the team of 22 students conceived, planned, and built the game, using a modular, layered design that allows for scalability and flexibility:
- Simulation Mode: Players observe climate change impacts on a map over time, with no direct intervention, which is ideal for understanding baseline environmental processes.
- Scenario Mode: A single-player experience where users manage resources, build infrastructure, and attempt to transition from fossil fuels to clean energy while mitigating disasters.
- Social Mode: Multiplayer functionality introduces political and social dynamics, allowing players to compete or collaborate in managing shared resources and territory.
Stretch goals included advanced features like machine learning-driven disaster prediction, Steam integration, and additional climate-related events such as hurricanes and droughts.
Graduating with more than a diploma
Creating Turn The Tides enabled these BCIT Computing students to gain hands-on experience in end-to-end project management, game development, and systems design.
“Preparing computing students for the workforce is challenging due to rapidly evolving technologies, and the need for graduates to be ready to join complex, multidisciplinary projects requiring teamwork and communication,” explains Option Head and Faculty Dr. Mirela Gutica. “To address this, I assign a large-scale project in the second year of the CST Diploma Technical Programming Option, where all students work together to plan, design, implement, optimize, integrate, and test a comprehensive solution.”
Mirela explains that the class forms teams, such as AI, Arts, Core Logic, Database, DevOps, and Quality Assurance. They also take on various roles including project manager, team lead, developer, tester, AI and User Experience/User Interface (UX/UI) specialist, and then collaborate across groups.
“This year’s class demonstrated strong cohesion, motivation, and initiative, tackling a demanding project and exploring technologies beyond those taught in class,” emphasizes Mirela. “Each team contributed to a robust technical solution, stylish UI and website design, effective AI, database implementation, thorough code reviewing, testing, and streamlined development through DevOps. I am extremely proud of the class of 2025’s accomplishments!”
“This project really gave us a chance to put everything that we learned in the past two years into one project,” says student and Project Manager Corey Buchan. “We tackled challenges in graphics rendering, performance, sound effects, networking, predictive AI, server maintenance, and API design.”
Corey congratulated the team members for putting in so much work over the final term, emphasizing that “graduating from BCIT, and having a published game as well, is an incredible achievement.”
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