Author Archives: FloodSkinner

About FloodSkinner

I am a geoscience researcher, educator, and content creator specialising in water, computer models, and games.

Le-tting-go – March 2026

I’ve been in my new job for two months now and I am pleased to report that I am still loving every second of it. Working with students is full of highs and lows – the last few weeks has had its share of both – but is incredibly rewarding. Although I’ve had plenty of experience lecturing and leading workshops, I’ve not had much experience of the one-to-one tutorial work and I’ve been enjoying getting to grips with this part of the job.

Teaching

I am especially enjoying getting to use creative and game-based approaches for my Environmental Hazards module. This includes some of my favourite tools and also things I have worked on in the past but never really had the opportunity to use properly. Firstly, I wanted the students to appreciate how individuals had different vulnerabilities and resilience to hazards – we explored this in the context of children and young people using the Help Callum and Help Sali 360 immersive storytelling videos from the Flood Stories project. Five years on from finishing these, this was the first time I had got to use them!

Stop Disasters is absolute classic of the games for geoscience and disaster risk reduction genres. It is made for school kids really, but framed in the right way it can be useful in higher education too. I’ve already used the flood level in my River Management module to explore the ‘art of the possible’ in flood risk management, and a couple of weeks ago I used the tropical storm level in my Environmental Hazards module to allow students to try out counterfactual thinking. We also played Good Morning, a micro-RPG I wrote last year to explore how downward counterfactuals work. I was pleasantly surprised at how well it worked and a good feeling to effectively use a tool I had written.

Goodbyes

This month I also got to say a proper goodbye to my former Environment Agency colleagues from the Flood Hydrology Improvements Programme (FHIP). As a dispersed national team, we worked almost entirely remotely and only got together in-person two or three times a year. They chose to meet in York for their first meeting of 2026 so I could join them for dinner. This was such a nice gesture and I was reminded of just how much I miss them all. It still does not feel right that I won’t get to see them all regularly anymore…

NERC EMBRACE with LEGO!

Another highlight from the last month was the workshops for the NERC EMBRACE Enviro project. Led by the wonderful Dr Olalekan Adekola, this pilot project is part of the NERC Opening up the Environment call, and seeks to engage members of the refugee and migrant communities with environmental science and careers. Over three days, two groups undertook two days of free training. This included analysing water quality in the lab, GIS, and science communication.

I was involved in the project in the middle of last year, long before my current role was even advertised. I was included as an external consultant – through my side quest as GeoSkinner – to support the science communication training. These workshops then were also my last act as a freelancer and were based on my LEGO(R) Serious Play(R) inspired Play your Research workshops. I helped the participants find and visualise their science and personal stories of the workshop by building with the LEGO bricks.

These workshops never cease to amaze me. The start is often a mix of some being excited at the prospect of playing with LEGO bricks and others being cynical for the same reason. But, once we get going people are surprised by their own imagination and creativity and the insights that they self-reveal are truly incredible. I reflected on the workshop that not only did the participants discover their own stories, their insights highlighted the power of the workshop and the benefits they got from it. It would have been powerful evaluation data.

New Paper

I have a new paper out! For the last few years I have been part of an International Association of Hydrological Sciences (IAHS) working group on science communication, part of the organisation’s HELPING science decade. The paper reflects the collective work of the group – expertly led by Christina Orieschnig and Soham Adla – and provides a summary of science communication in hydrology and tips to make sure it is effective.

Honestly, many have put a lot more working into this than I have but I’m proud to have contributed and to have my name attached. You can read the open access paper in Hydrological Sciences Journal.

Games for Geoscience

In the last few weeks the organising committee of the European Geoscience Union General Assembly has been working hard wrangling nearly 20,000 abstracts into a conference programme. With 14 abstracts, Games for Geoscience fell just below the threshold for a full science session (talks + posters) so instead this year the session will be PICOs.

I’m a little disappointed as the session usually has a good involvement with those attending virtually, and I have found the poster and PICO sessions far less accessible for virtual presenters and attendees than talks. But, I’m still looking forward to another awesome session and of course, the world famous Geoscience Games Night will be back too!

Next month’s newsletter will be devoted to EGU, including the full programme for the Games for Geoscience session and sharing the contributions I’ll be making at the conference – my first as a academic since before the Covid lockdowns!

See you in April!

Chris

Views expressed in this newsletter are mine and do not represent those of my employer. Content and links are provided for informational purposes and do not constitute endorsements. I am not responsible for the content of external sites, which may have changed since this newsletter was produced.

Get this newsletter sent directly to your inbox each month:

Transitions – February 2026

Leave a reply

I’ve just finished presenting a webinar for the UNRISK CDT about my work with games. It was months ago when James McKay and Erica Thompson from the CDT invited me to talk, before I had even applied for my current job. So, figuring out what I was going to say was tough. Back then, I was freelance, GeoSkinner, just messing around with games because it interested me and kept me creative. Now, as an academic again, I have an opportunity to be more serious and focussed about it and do some ‘proper’ research. My presentation sat at this transition point – a collection of ideas waiting to be forged into something meaningful.

Transition, then, has been the theme of my last month, my first as a Lecturer of Geography at York St John University. Obviously, there’s been the usual transition to a new workplace: the obligatory fire safety and slips, trips, and falls training; navigating a different travel booking system; and, learning the unwritten rules of how the new place works. For example, where my old team predominantly communicated using chat in MS Teams, my new team rarely uses it and favours emails. It sounds small, but it’s been an adjustment.

But it hasn’t just been a change of job and employer, it has been a shift in sector and career. What I did not expect was how strong a sense of freedom I would feel, it has taken me by surprise. There were understandable and reasonable limits to what I could do within my previous role, which was why I maintained my interests independently. I hadn’t appreciated how difficult it was to partition my professional life in this way, until I no longer had to. If I want to explore the pedagogical value of building with LEGO bricks it is now valuable professional practice and a potential research avenue that I am encouraged to pursue, rather than something I will try and fit around work and life. Honestly, it feels like I’ve been holding my breath and now I can breathe out finally.

Another big transition has been the change in pace of the work. My old role was strategic and deadlines were defined by quarters and financial years a distance away. As an ADHDer, my concept of time is now and not-now, so strategic planning has never been my strength. I often describe my brain as like an old petrol-powered lawnmower where you keep pulling the cord to get it going but it just keeps sputtering out. It was hard to get going and without the excellent project managers I worked alongside I would have struggled big time. But, in my new role, I’ve had no option but to hit the ground running – there’s marking and moderation to do, students applying for jobs to help, and the start of teaching is looming large. I’m actually finding this change of pace refreshing, more suited to my neurotype and, as well as enjoying this, I’m finding it easy to make use of those liminal times between tasks and meetings.

This then brings me back to that transition at the start of this newsletter. This transition, shaping my interests into a cohesive programme of research, is one I am yet to crack but is something I really want to get right. Whilst I am immensely proud of what I achieved as a Research Fellow at the Energy and Environment Institute, I have always felt regret at not achieving what I would have like to and what I know I am capable of. Looking back, I can see how I was constantly battling the ADHD in my mind, even though I didn’t realise it then. This time around, the expectations and the culture are different and, crucially, I know myself much, much better.

Game-Based Approaches in Geoscience (Game-BAG)

My first project I plan to develop is Game-BAG (I love a dodgy acronym). It will bring together several strands of my work into one place with common objectives. This includes Games for Geoscience, Adventures in Model Land, and my work with the LEGO® SERIOUS PLAY® methodology. Planning is still work in progress but I’d particularly like to look at:

How game-based approaches are used to support education and training in geosciences (using EGU’s broad definition)
How game-based approaches can support the understanding and development of numerical models with modellers and technical experts
How game-based approaches can build model literacy in non-modellers, particularly decision-makers

Games for Geoscience

Games for Geoscience will be back for EGU 26. We got 15 brilliant abstracts and we’re still waiting to hear what format the session will be. More news about the session and the Geoscience Games Night will be available soon – make sure you check the website for updates. As with last year, I also hope to bring blogs and game profiles from those featured in the session.

GeoSkinner YouTube

Testament to how long it has been since I have provided a proper update, there is a ‘new’ video on the GeoSkinner YouTube channel that is already 5 months old… I played Terra Firma, an indie videogame that is essentially a playable landscape evolution model, the type of geomorphology model that much of my previous research made use of. Actually, it’s been so long the Dev has released Terra Firma 2 since…

I have no plans for any new videos to come soon but some ideas I’d like to explore. Going forward, my videos will probably be more closer related to my research especially Game-BAG – yet more transitions to come!

Project Prospero

I’ve been on a hobby spree the last couple of months and progressed my Warhammer project, themed on the Burning of Prospero. Too much to update here, but visit my hobby site to see the latest.

Subscribe to get the latest newsletter sent directly to your inbox:

Moving on… (Part 2): New Year, New Job

Leave a reply

I am extraordinarily excited to tell you that I will be joining York St John University (YSJ) in the new year as a Lecturer of Geography! To be honest, it is my dream job.

When I left transport planning to start a PhD way back in 2009, my goal was to be a lecturer. It is the only job I have ever really wanted. When the role I now have was advertised, I threw everything I had at it – whether or not I was to be successful, I wanted to “leave nothing on the pitch”.

In part 1 of this blog, I looked back at what I had achieved at the EA, in this part I want to look forward to things I am most excited about.

Teaching

My new role will be predominantly teaching. I am anticipating doing a lot of it and being very busy. Honestly, I am looking forward to this. I’ve had the opportunity recently to develop and deliver a new module on river management for the third-year geographers at YSJ. The module mixed lectures, workshops, and field visits, and I made a lot of use of games throughout. It was practical, focussing on real-world applications, and I brought in those working in the sector to speak to the students. I just found it awesomely rewarding and when I am working with the students it just feels like that is where I am supposed to be.

It has become apparent to me in the last few years that my passion is for education – it how I have chosen to spend my free time. I want to teach. I want to learn how to do it better. I want to get very good at it. I want to explore new ways of doing it and write about it. What an opportunity this is to do that!

Research and being creative

As an EA employee you are a public servant. You have a very clear job role, fulfilling an important function but with little scope to work outside of your job description. There were only a few opportunities in my day job to keep up my creative practice and maintain my science communication skills. For example, I was faced with a choice of either dropping out of organising the Games for Geoscience session or staying involved but in my own free time and at my own cost. It was also important that my own personal work was entirely and clearly separate from my day job and created no conflicts of interest. Hence, I developed the GeoSkinner brand to give my creative practice a distinct home. Still, I always felt guilty about this, like I was being unfaithful to my job.

In my new role, this creative work is encouraged and can be part of my day job (although the concept of a ‘day’ job in academia can be a little woolly). I am really looking forward to bringing together the different strands of my work into one. Obviously, I need to get settled in, and manage my time, but here are some of things you might see me working on in the coming years:

NERC Embrace-Enviro: This project has been funded by NERC and is led by my colleagues at YSJ. It is working with migrant and refugee communities to help them access science training, experience, and careers. I will be part of the team delivering science communication training in early 2026.

Games for Geoscience: We are approaching ten years of the Games for Geoscience session at the European Geoscience Union General Assembly, including the Geoscience Games Night. My ambition is for it to transcend the session and develop into a community with year-round activity.

Adventures in Model Land: Inspired by tabletop roleplay games (TTRPG), Adventures in Model Land is an open-source framework to help modellers design explorable worlds based on numerical models. Recently, I took part in a Maths on the Move podcast about the project, you can listen here. I hope to bring some new energy to this project.

Play Your PhD: My imagination workshops, inspired by LEGO SERIOUS PLAY, are aimed at helping PhD students develop their imaginations as a useful skill. I’m really keen to develop an entire gamified programme of workshops equipping early career researchers with playful skills.

Hydrology Tea-Break: The majority of people who work with hydrology would not actually call themselves a hydrologist. Hydrology Tea-Break would use science communication as CPD aimed at those needing to follow multi-disciplinary T-shaped careers.

Models as Imagination Infrastructure: Imagination Infrastructures are things that help us think of and picture positive futures and change. Models can help us imagine the future but are often inaccessible and tend to focus on understanding impacts of disasters and worst-case scenarios. I’d like to explore the capacity of models to help us imagine alternative, more hopeful, futures. Games are a potential medium to help make such models more accessible.

I hope to provide regular updates on my work through this blog so please do subscribe using the box below – I’ll aim for monthly updates but this might fluctuate when I get busy!

If you’re interested in working together, either on one of the projects above or something else entirely, please do get in touch, I’d love to chat (c dot skinner at yorksj dot ac dot uk).

Moving on… (Part 1)

1 Reply

I have news. I have a new job! So, it is with great sadness that at the end of December I will be leaving the Environment Agency (EA) after nearly five brilliant years.

Even though my new job is an extremely exciting opportunity – more on this in part 2 – I am sad to leave the EA as it is an important organisation that I am extremely fond of. Everybody I have met here has been supportive and 110% committed to their job and the mission of the business. Not least my wonderful team that I will miss massively. I will always be proud to have been a part of it.

I’m leaving the role of Senior Technical Adviser in Hydrology, part of the team delivering Flood Hydrology Improvements Programming (FHIP). Me and my fellow FHIPsters work at the science-policy-practice interface, which is the space where the latest science and research is translated into the everyday processes we use to make decisions – in our case, these are decisions to reduce and manage the risks of flooding. The FHIP is linked to the UK’s Flood Hydrology Roadmap, a community co-created plan to improve flood hydrology over a 25-year period to 2046(ish).

My job is to be the technical lead on projects in the programme alongside a project manager and a team of subject matter experts. I also act as a subject matter expert for projects led by my colleagues. These projects are either delivered in house by me and the team, or we commission them out to experts in consultancies. In the case of the latter, my role is to provide technical steer and review to ensure the product being delivered is what we need. Due to the broad remit of the FHIP, the nature of these projects varies a lot.

Reflecting on my 4.75 years at the EA and in the FHIP, I’ve been thinking about what my highlights, or the things I’m most proud of, are. Here are just some:

Open Methods in Operational Flood Hydrology report

Joining fresh from academia in 2021, wet behind the ears and full of naïve verve to disrupt the sector, I gladly took the lead on a project to look at the feasibility and benefits of applying open science principals to methods used in flood hydrology decision-making. The scientific literature loudly, and rightly, extols the virtues of open science, including in hydrology, supported by international organisations including UNESCO. Surely, this was a no brainer for the operational, decision-maker realm?

This project was one of those commissioned to a consultancy, and I really valued the collaborative relationship we built with them in its delivery. I learnt quickly that the evidence supporting open methods in research does not translate directly into the operational realm. Although there are many potential benefits, there were also some potential risks, but also a whole lot of questions that would need to be answered on the way.

Most of these questions still need to be addressed by the hydrological community. The purpose of the report was to facilitate this conversation by providing a vision and an evidence base to start from. The creative approach taken by the team reflected this and was a joy to be a part of – see the great video by artists and project partners Somewhere/Nowhere above.

The report is currently shared on the FHIP’s webpages.

UK’s Hydrology Skills and Satisfaction Survey

One of the actions required by the UK’s Flood Hydrology Roadmap was to create a baseline of skills across the hydrology community. This was one of the actions taken on by the FHIP and one of the areas where the FHIP directly contributed to the delivery of the Roadmap. I was the technical lead and it was also a project where the delivery was in-house.

Infogram saying "92% are keen to learn new skills in their role"

Working with the EA’s Market Research team, I designed a survey to evaluate the skills and satisfaction of the users of hydrology in the UK. I advertised it far and wide, doing webinars, posting on mailing lists, finding local authority special interest groups, and writing articles for magazines about roads. It was worth it as it attracted 286 responses, a return I was very pleased with.

I really enjoyed this project – partly because I got to be hands-on and deliver it myself, but mainly because I discovered a passion for skills and understanding what people need to develop. The project also revealed some important things about the users of hydrology, not least how the diversity of the hydrology work force is not representative of the UK population as a whole.

The Results and Technical reports for this project are currently shared on the FHIP’s webpages.

Environment Agency Summer Activities @ The Science Museum

I rarely got to fully stretch my science communication and creative interests and skills in my role in FHIP. However, the EA provides its employees lots of development opportunities and I had the chance to hone some leadership skills by being a joint project manager for the EA’s Summer Activities at the Science Museum.

Selfie of me in a blue Environment Agency hard hat and a red life jacket.

Starting in 2022, the EA have led a month of STEM learning activities at the Science Museum (yes, the huge one in Kensington). Each year it has grown in size and prominence, and in 2024 the activities were moved from a space at the back to Technicians: The David Sainsbury Gallery, overlooking the main entrance lobby. We increased from three to four weeks and had space to run four separate zones.

This was a truly challenging – somewhat bruising – task that threatened to implode on a number of occasions. However, I am so proud of what we achieved – training 120 volunteers, successfully delivering four separate activity zones for four weeks over the busy summer holidays, and facilitating conversations with 80,000 members of the public (as estimated by the Science Museum). Working with Dr Laura Hobbs of the Science Communication Unit at University of West England, our evaluation showed that the volunteers gained valuable skills and confidence from the experience (paper coming soon hopefully).

The organising team won the EA’s internally prodigious One Team Award at the Environment Agency Awards, and it was thoroughly deserved by everybody involved. Sadly, there was no trophy.

Personal Development

I have learned a tonne during my time on the FHIP: Lots about operational hydrology; plenty about decision-making and the ‘art of the possible’; and more than I ever wanted to know about charity governance. I also learned a lot about myself, including the realisation about three years ago that I am ADHD.

The EA is a truly supportive organisation – it says it looks after its people and in my experience, it means it. I had colleagues who felt empowered to talk openly about their experiences and challenges with their own neurotypes, and it was from hearing these that made me question my own experiences. The EA gave me the space and support to go on this journey – including accommodations, ADHD-specific coaching, and line managers who treated it with curiosity and care. It has helped me enormously. I don’t know if I would have discovered this about myself anywhere else and I doubt my experiences would have been as positive.

Part of me will always be #TeamEA and I hope to continue many of the relationships I have built there and beyond in my new role. To learn more about that, and the future of GeoSkinner, you’ll have to wait for part 2 – make sure you subscribe so you don’t miss it.

Inspiring Interactions – Simon Clark

Leave a reply

Simon Clark is one of the most successful science communicators on YouTube. His channel, @SimonClark, currently has over 644,000 subscribers and his videos regularly amass hundreds of thousands of views. Although his channel is now focussed on promoting climate literacy it started 15 years ago as a vlog about his experiences as a state-educated student attending University of Oxford. This was significant because Oxford and Cambridge have traditionally been a space for privately-educated students – even today where less than 7% of students are privately educated they make up 30% of student intake at these universities, and historically this has led to a disproportionate under-representation of state-educated citizens in important roles (e.g., 65% of senior judges are privately-educated). It’s clear that his representation of the state-educated voice in that arena resonated with many people.

What I have found inspiring about Simon is how he has managed re-invent and evolve his channel throughout his career. From that original vlog, through his time doing a PhD at the University of Exeter, to going full-time afterwards, and now focussing on climate literacy. He has adapted and grown with his audience whilst remaining true to himself and the content he wants to make and feels is important. Recently, he has been open about struggling with YouTube’s algorithm and the threat that poses to his livelihood – this led to another re-invention and the incorporation of some physical models into his videos. Simon makes these by hand and they are beautiful and he has been rewarded with millions of views. It’s imagination, it’s craft, and it’s realness – all the things I think people yearn for.

I’m also inspired by Simon as he is living my dream in many ways. He gets to be creative, share knowledge, and inspire people to learn every single day. He has already achieved my ambition and written a book (with an excellent audiobook version read by Simon himself). Like me, he’s a big gaming and Warhammer fan and successfully brings these into his work (seriously, check out his awesome Hawaiian Orks). When I put together videos for my YouTube channel, I looked to Simon’s for ideas – how can I put it together, how do I tell the story, how can I film this? Simon also co-hosted a brilliant podcast How to Make a Science Video with Sophie Ward where they chatted to other science creators. It is so jammed with useful insights and ideas that I highly recommend you listen if you want to make science videos.

I asked Simon some questions about imagination and his work.

Why is imagination important to the work you do?

Imagination is vital to me for two reasons. Firstly, YouTube is such a crowded marketplace that anyone not being imaginative in how they present their work risks being crowded by any number of content creators making things by the book. By making things that no one has ever made before, you stand out in a competitive niche. But more than that, and this is the second reason, it’s deeply fulfilling. I would never dream of referring to myself as an artist, but I think there is a part of me that clamours to express itself via art. Making videos is of course itself an art form, but trying to innovate and ask “what could I do here that’s unique” provides another level of artistic fulfilment.

How do you keep your imagination sharp?

I firmly believe that in order to create art you must consume art, and so I’m almost constantly hunting for new stimuli in the form of videos, podcasts, ideas, films, games, but particularly music. I’m one of those people who absolutely rinses their Spotify subscription. I think being exposed to new ideas in one medium – such as music – makes you question preconceptions and biases you have in other media forms. And doing that is the first step to creating something innovative. Which is the other key component – in order to create… you need to create! So I try to do something creative, whether that’s painting or singing or writing or videomaking, every day.

What are you currently working on that you would like to shout about?

I’m in the very early stages of a mammoth video that’s a sequel of sorts to my tiny Earth video. I can’t say much, but it’s going to be big in scale and involve very small models. And trains.

This post was originally published as part of the Imagination Engines newsletter. To get my content earlier and straight to your email subscribe using the box below: