Abstract:

While the potential of digital games in education is widely accepted [1]–[3], encouraging learners to create their own games reveals learning outcomes that go beyond the conventional learning and thinking. Recent work in the field of educational research establishes a relationship between students’ involvement in the creation of games and an increase in the interest about the addressed themes, as well as a better understanding of the importance of those subjects [4]–[6]. By developing their own games, students felt encouraged to explore their limits, increased collaboration and exchange of ideas among peers [7], developed greater interest regarding the addressed topic, acquired scientific concepts, and developed digital literacy during the process [8], [9].

Integrating game creation activities in classroom environments, however, requires a new way to think about code, programming and technology. When considering implementing game-creation activities as a strategy to explore educational context, educators face additional challenges: to think about how to design and implement new and appropriate learning activities that guarantee that students apprehend the programming concepts, integrating it into their learning process [10], to manage the additional required time and to develop the specific skills needed to develop their own educational games [11]. Moreover, this approach requires teachers an additional effort, as there is the need to provide students the tools and techniques that can help them complete a task whose outcome will be both pedagogical and playful in nature.

In this paper, we present the main results of the [hidden] project, an Erasmus+ project that involves secondary schools from four European countries (Spain, Hungary, Ireland and Portugal) and aims to raise young student’s awareness on the importance of environmental and biodiversity preservation through in- nature activities and the creation of digital games. Acknowledging the importance in involving all educational stakeholders (management, teachers and students) as active agents of this approach, the project has three interventional axes: a teacher training course (attended by 12 upper-secondary teachers) providing training on how to:
i) develop and implement a pedagogical project able to encompass in-nature and game-creation activities,
ii) develop educational resources to be used as theme for the future developed games and
iii) support students in creating digital games for learning addressing local biodiversity and environmental problems; a short-term training course targeted at upper-secondary students (attended by 24 students), providing them training on how to create playable digital games addressing the nature and biodiversity-related themes introduced by teachers; and the organization of game creation events in student’s schools, where students that have attended the training course will share their experience with their peers, challenging them to participate in the game design events. This last axe will involve more than 120 students from the four different countries.

Although the project is still ongoing, preliminary results indicate that the [hidden] project’s approach can support the different educational stakeholders to develop digital games addressing environmental and sustainable issues, thus leading to a greater awareness of the importance of protecting nature and the environment.

Keywords:

Digital games, environmental awareness, students’ engagement, teachers training, upper-secondary education.