A Playful Path to Sustainability: Synthesizing Design Strategies for Children’s Environmental Sustainability Learning Through Gameful Interventions.

A Playful Path to Sustainability: Synthesizing Design Strategies for Children’s Environmental Sustainability Learning Through Gameful Interventions.

A Playful Path to Sustainability: Synthesizing Design Strategies for Children’s Environmental Sustainability Learning Through Gameful Interventions.

Raghad Albar, Andrea Gauthier, Asimina Vasalou

Abstract

"The climate crisis has created a time of great uncertainty for chil-dren and their futures, raising need for new approaches that support children to learn about environmental sustainability (ES) and pre- pare them for living with climate impacts. Systematic reviews of IDC have highlighted instances of gameful interventions (i.e., game- based learning (GBL), gamification, and game-authoring) that offer meaningful ES learning opportunities, but there is not yet a com-prehensive synthesis of how this is achieved. Our paper reports on a systematic review of 39 interventions to interrogate how gameful interventions are designed to foster children’s ES learning. Our re-sults contribute four themes: “GBL genres fostering distinct forms of ES understanding”, “gamification as a reinforcer to children’s sustainable action”, “game-authoring allowing children to voice their perspectives to critical audiences”, and “transversal skills em- bedded in gameful interventions”. Based on these findings, the paper proposes design implications for future research in gameful interventions and ES."

Reference

Albar, R., Gauthier, A., & Vasalou, A. (2024). A playful path to sustainability: Synthesizing design strategies for children’s environmental sustainability learning through gameful interventions. In Proceedings of the 23rd Annual ACM Interaction Design and Children Conference (pp. 201–217). ACM. https://discovery.ucl.ac.uk/id/eprint/10191385/2/idc24-17.pdf

Keywords

Game-based Learning, Gamification, Game Authoring