Playful interventions for sustainability awareness in educational environments: A longitudinal, large-scale study in three countries

With the United Nations (UN) Sustainable Development Goals and national commitments requiring effective implementation of evidence-based innovations, we are witnessing a growing number of related interventions in educational environments based on digitalization and gamification. In particular, serious games and playful activities are being used to empower children’s awareness and reflection on issues related to climate change and sustainability. In this work, we discuss such approaches through the lens of our own experience with an intervention targeting school environments. Our study is based on a playful web application that focuses on sustainability awareness and energy-related aspects, the GAIA Challenge, which was used in over 25 schools in 3 countries, resulting in 3762 registered users. We present a longitudinal study on the use of GAIA Challenge focusing on children’s engagement, rate of completion of the content on offer, and overall reaction by the school communities involved in large-scale trials, complemented with insights from surveys answered by 723 students and 32 educators. Our results showed that up to 20% of the children completed all content available in the Challenge, when gameplay sessions were combined with strong community competition activities. The children also reported increased awareness of related sustainability issues. Our findings demonstrate that a simple playful experience can yield good results within educational environments, by taking into consideration typical school constraints, integrating it to the daily activities of schools and placing it within their strategy.