Save Polar Bears in Fun Environmental Game: Review of the National Grid's Floe

Save Polar Bears in Fun Environmental Game: Review of the National Grid's Floe
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If you like polar bears, you’ll enjoy a free environmental game on the National Grid website. The game is fun to play, and may just help save the environment.

All you have to do is go to www.nationalgridfloe.com, and you’ll meet Floe, a virtual polar bear who lives on an iceberg on the National Grid website. In the environmental game called “Discover the Power of Action” you answer questions about your energy use, and the iceberg grows or shrinks, depending on your answers.

Do you drive a big SUV and heat your home with oil?

Crunch! Crack! Uh oh Floe, hang on there – the chunk of ice shrinks.

But, if you promise to use energy-efficient bulbs and leave your computer on less each day – there we go, Floe – the iceberg grows.

Thank goodness, because seeing Floe’s iceberg shrink is actually kind of scary. You don’t want the polar bear to end up in the freezing water!

The environmental game encourages users to use energy efficient lightbulbs and take shorter showers. One of the funniest tips is that people should try to avoid using the bathroom in an airplane. Well, it’s not as if anyone wants to use that bathroom.

If you click on “befriend a bear” on the National Grid website you get a child-friendly environmental game in which you get to name a polar bear cub. If you answer questions correctly, you get to feed the polar bear cub fish, and play with it.

According to a National Grid press release, their environmental games are an attempt to help customers “analyze and measure the environmental effects of their routine daily activities, including eating, drinking, driving and making home heating energy choices.”

National Grid encourages you to switch to natural gas heat for your home. But that sales pitch is only one small part of their website.

Overall, these are fun environmental games that enable adults and children to make better choices about the environment. The National Grid website can be a bit slow to load, and some of the questions are very simple. But these environmental games with polar bears are an interesting approach to get people to save the environment, and they don’t cost anything to try.