Abstract:

The Sustainable City Game has been created to approach the United Nation Agenda 2030 and sustainability topics, as exploitation of georesources, clean energy, responsible consumption and production, actions for climate, sustainable cities and communities. This educational game aims to increase students’ awareness about a more sustainable lifestyle, encouraging them to take action towards a responsible management of planet resources. It is planned to be played by K6-K10 level students. Starting from their daily routine actions, like eating and dressing, the game allows to investigate topics like water saving and carbon footprint, ecological rucksack, circular economy and waste reduction, using a multidisciplinary approach, with inputs from several disciplines, which allows to have a holistic vision of the sustainable development goals.

Geoscience topics represent the key to approach all environmental issues, like climate, oceans, georesources, energy, introducing the students to complex topics or accompanying them to the study and the environmental problems of the area they live in. Recent Italian curricula guidelines (National Department of Education) also highlight the importance of Education for Sustainable Development and the acquisition of digital skills. Therefore, it is important to improve geoscience teaching to acquire valuable knowledge as well as developing skills of active citizenship and increased environmental awareness.

The cardboard version of the game has been planned to be played by four teams in school. Each team has an itinerary to follow in steps, to reach the heart of a sustainable city, starting from a conventional city. The itinerary includes individual and team challenges as disciplinary multiple-answer quizzes and mini-games. The experimentation of the game has been realized following an educational path about georesources, their distribution and uses, the pollution, the concept of renewable and non-renewable resources. The questions allow pupils to reflect about simple but effective actions to take in their everyday life for increasing environmental sustainability.

During the COVID-19 pandemic, most Italian schools have adopted distance learning. Therefore, a digital version of the game has been created in a virtual world based on the 3D Opensimulator platform that can be accessed by teachers and students as avatars. The game resides in a virtual island where an educational path about sustainability has been developed using 3D interactive learning objects, online web games, multimedia presentations and external web resources.

In the online version of the game the avatars/players are the pawns of the game and move on the board by clicking on an interactive panel and use the text chat to start every mini-game and answer the questions. Some tests of the game are carried out using online educational apps, or sharing online interactive whiteboards.

The cardboard and 3D virtual version of the game have been tested both with teachers and students. Results are very satisfying in terms of involvement of students as well as interest for the activity from the teachers. Students declared that it is an effective and engaging educational tool to vehicle the key principles of sustainability and good practices of everyday life.

This gaming approach allows students to acquire key competences of active citizenship for more sustainable lifestyles and to develop problem-solving attitude and digital skills.

Keywords:

Agenda 2030, Sustainable Development, Geoscience education, sustainable lifestyle, educational games, virtual worlds, Opensimulator.