Mr. Rogers Sustainable Neighborhood: A visual language case study for community education

Physical board games and the construction of physical models have been shown to be a valuable vehicle for education and communication, for use in the classroom as well as for issues of collaboration and conflict resolution. However, they are limited by their own physical nature. The use of a physical board game is limited to one location. Our research posed the question: Can we bring the benefits of these situation-based physical games to a computational medium adding the new benefits of the World Wide Web while preserving the accessibility and usefulness of the games? This case-study paper outlines our work on Mr. Rogers Sustainable Neighborhood and its journey from physical board game to a computational version, using the Visual AgenTalk (VAT) visual language, and the Agentsheets-based educational system WebQuest. We describe Mr. Rogers Sustainable Neighborhood as a physical game and its stakeholders, and discuss the applicability and effectiveness of the VAT language for this problem.