Coastplay: A Route-Based Prototype for Short-Term Public Climate Learning in Coastal Protected Areas

Coastplay is a route-based environmental communication prototype for short- term public climate learning in coastal protected-area settings.In coastal protected-area settings, there is a directness in it that makes short-term climate learning possible without reducing the landscape to poster explanation.Using the Southwest Alentejo and Vicentine Coast Natural Park (PNSACV) as a reference landscape, it organizes local pressures, landform change, and multispecies relations into three optional learning paths: ocean, cliff, and sky. The fact that these paths can work as learning sequences is in part due simply to their low threshold. It also owes to the happy circumstance that dragging, clicking, sliders, and evidence cards can render warming, storms, drought, erosion, and habitat change as comparable and conditional readings. Then,too, there is always something other than content in Coastplay to grasp hold of, for those who want to analyze.For Coastplay, unlike a same-content linear page, possesses a vocabulary of forms: the explicit and discussable technology of route choice, interaction, and evidence sequence that supports comparison. What emerges is a Research through Design proof- of-concept, with a remote formative comparison (final `N = 110`; route-based prototype `n = 55`; linear control `n = 55`) suggesting higher short-term comprehension, fewer deterministic misreadings, and richer conditional retelling than a same-content linear page. What is needed, first, is a reusable route-based learning grammar. If public-facing climate interfaces are to avoid overclaiming, an explicitly bounded evaluation serves them better than inflated impact language.What Coastplay contributes is a reusable route- based learning grammar and a bounded account of how such an interface can prepare evidence-linked discussion.