Here's a great opportunity to engage your students and community in  a game-based conversation about the future of NZ. Pounamu is a free, online game set in a future world where EVERYONE in New Zealand can use science as easily as they can use a computer now. Anyone can play; from primary school students to research scientists, from young entrepreneurs to kuia and koro.

The game will be live on 29-30 August, from midnight to midnight – all you need to do is register now to be able to access and participate. 

Players post micro-forecasts (concise ideas – 140 characters, like twitter) of future possibilities and build on, or reshape other players’ ideas. You can play for five minutes and share one idea, or play for the whole game and post hundreds of possible futures. Pounamu will have ’hubs’ scattered around the country on game days, so players who want to play in teams, or don’t have access to the internet, or just want to play in a social environment, have the opportunity to do so.

Pounamu is collaboration between the MacDiarmid Institute for Advanced Materials and Nanotechnology, StratEDGY Strategic Foresight; and Professor Shaun Hendy, winner of the Prime Minister's Science Media Communication prize and author of Get Off The Grass which he wrote with the late Sir Paul Callaghan.