This game gives you the opportunity to explore the relationship between the floods and the urban landscape on the one hand and probability and statistics on the other.
In the flooding / hydrology domain, terms such as the 50-year flood, 100-year flood, or 500-year flood are used.
This web site discusses the relationship between these terms and the mathematical concept of probablity. In brief, a 100-year flood means that a flood of that magnitude has a 1 percent (1/100) chance of happening in any year. A 100-year flood plain, then, is an area of land that is suseptible to a 100-year flood.
This games asks you to take on the role of a housing developer and make various decisions about "where to build" based on flood-plain location, costs of building in various locations, and choices between affordable housing and more standard housing.
For purposes of this game, the cost of land is tied to its flooding characteristics. More expensive land (that located in 500-year & 1000-year flood plains), is too expensive to build affordable housing and requires the building of 2 and 1 dwelling units respectively per square). Less expensive land in the 50-year and 100-year flood plains make possible the construction of affordable housing units and higher density standard housing units (4 and 3 units respectively to the square).
Using Dice to Simulate Flood Probabilities
This game uses rolls of dice to simulate certain probablities. A roll of double sixes, is used to represent a 500-year flood, a roll that adds to 10 represents an 100-year flood, other doubles represent a 50-year flood, and all other rolls represent "business as usual" (we do not include an option for a 1000-year flood, even though that could happen).You may wish to review some information on probabilities on this web page.
A question for you: are these representations valid as accurate representation of these probablities?
What is the probability of rolling double sixes? of a 500-year flood?
What is the probability of rolling a 10? of a 100-year flood?
What is the probability of rolling other doubles? of a 50-flood?
If these do not match up, how could you choose a more valid representation? How do you think that this might enhance or detract from the learning experience?
You can view the frequency of flood statistics as well as the frequency of occurence of the possible sums as played out in this game session by clicking on the header of the Statistics pane to the right. A saved set of these statistics from an earlier session can be seen on this page.