ODU Team Plays in Earth Day Bay Game

Twenty-five students and faculty members from Old Dominion University joined with teams from other schools for the intercollegiate rollout of the UVa Bay Game on Earth Day, April 22.

The game is a large-scale, agent-based simulation of the Chesapeake Bay watershed that allows players to take the roles of stakeholders, such as farmers, local policy-makers, watermen, and developers. Players make decisions about farming and fishing strategies, land development, tax incentives and regulatory matters. Then the games' numbers-crunching software - which depends upon 51,000 differential equations - quickly reports the economic and environmental impacts of these decisions.

Richard Zimmerman, the professor of ocean, earth and atmospheric sciences who has led the effort to make ODU a member of the UVa Bay Game consortium, coordinated ODU's participation in the event together with David Burdige, also a professor of ocean, earth and atmospheric sciences.

ODU's team fashioned a control center in the first floor foyer of the Physical Sciences Building on the Norfolk campus.

Other teams also participated from their home institutions, and interacted via the Internet, a videoconferencing system, Twitter and Facebook. The central game site was at U.Va. in Charlottesville and other participating schools were Virginia Tech, the College of William and Mary, Virginia Commonwealth University, Hampton University and the Naval Academy.