Designing Effective Playful Experiences for Sustainability Awareness in Schools and Makerspaces

Sustainability awareness in young people, and especially students, is growing in importance. To this end, serious games and playful experiences are used to enable students and teachers to actively study climate change issues and respective challenges. Many approaches have been proposed, ranging from quiz-based web applications to full-blown game experiences. We discuss several related design aspects through the lens of our own experience with gamification inside educational environments. Our results derive from the use of a playful web application focusing on sustainability and energy issues, developed within the GAIA project and used in 25 schools with 3762 registered users. We also present results from surveys answered by 723 students and 32 educators. Our findings show that a simple playful experience can yield good results within educational environments when taking into account their constraints, integrating the intervention to schools’ everyday life and placing it within a strategy that includes other tools.

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