More than 100 students at the University of Virginia in Charlottesville will try their hands today at saving the Chesapeake Bay.  They'll sit down at computers, pretend they're farmers, developers, watermen and policy makers and see if they can figure out how to restore this national treasure without putting themselves out of business in the process.  It's all in good fun, but with a serious educational purpose.

It's a showcase for the university's Bay Game, an interactive role-playing computer simulation that's programmed to track the health of the Chesapeake while responding to the actions of the people who live on the water and make a living within its 64,000-square mile watershed. 

"I'm trying to educate the students here," said David Smith, a professor of environmental science who played a major role in the game's development.  "I want them to be environmentally literate people."  The bay's a complex place, he said, where natural and social forces interact.  Through playing the game, Smith said, "I want them to learn a more sophisticated approach and be attuned to the complexity."

The game is the product of more than a year's collaboration among faculty from 11 departments in eight different schools.  It divides the bay up into seven different watersheds, generally tracking major river tributaries.  Programmers have keyed in 51,000 mathematical equations to model the impacts of nutrients fouling the bay's water, government incentives to curb the pollution and fishing pressure and regulations, among other things. 

Players make choices about how they'll pursue their livelihoods and what they'll do for the bay, and then watch the results of their decisions play out in a series of turns over a 20-year time frame. As the screen shot at right shows, they'll be able to watch the dead zone grow or shrink in the bay, depending on what they do.

Sounds deadly serious, but it's meant to be entertaining - kind of like saving your Sim City from hurricanes, aliens or volcanoes - albeit with an educational purpose.  (As a U.Va. grad from the '70s, I'm jealous - the computers I worked with then were no fun at all.  They were big mainframes programmed with punch tape, with a maddening habit of freezing up if you slipped up keying in your logic routines. That's one reason I wound up in journalism instead of engineering.) 

Helping the students play their roles today as growers, fishermen and the like will be some real ones.  They've been invited by the university to come try out the game and educate the participants about the choices and challenges they face in real life.

Also on hand will be Philippe Cousteau, environmental activist, TV correspondent and grandson of the famed undersea explorer Jacques Cousteau.  An environmental design and marketing firm the younger Cousteau has co-founded, Azure Worldwide, has partnered with the university to develop a version of the game targeting youngsters in grades K-12.

"Games are really a great tool for education," Cousteau said in a recent interview.  "People need to understand the long-term impacts of their behavior," he added, though those typically are hard to see before it's too late. After trying his hand ad a farmer and waterman, Cousteau said the game is "kind of addictive" and it becomes apparent after playing awhile that the only way to improve the bay and not ruin your own livelihood is for everyone to collaborate.

"That's the hopeful side," Cousteau said.  "People really get it that if we don't work together on this problem, we won't fix it."

For more on the game, go here.  Maybe after playing the students will understand why their elders have made such a hash of the bay to date.  Or, just maybe, they'll find a way to do what's eluded everyone else so far, and we could learn from them.

(Photos by Dan Addison courtesy of the University of Virginia)