Abstract:

The environmental challenge, linked to the conservation of our planet and its resources, is no longer evasive. With the Agenda 2030 (2015) the UN asked all the peoples of the world (even the poorest ones) to make choices that are radically different from those made in the past.
To make this happen, a profound cultural change is required in people, in institutions, in the business world, in associations, in schools. Environmental education aims to promote training experiences that, through thoughts, emotions and actions, lead students (pupils, teachers, parents) to discover, to rediscover or, more simply, to affirm of values and ethical behaviors that respect the environment.
Today environmental education is particularly important in training and growth because it allows promoting the skills necessary to challenge existing models and activate virtuous processes of change in behavior and lifestyles.

The UNECE Strategy for Education for Sustainable Development (Vilnius, 2005) defines environmental education as a requirement for sustainable development and as a tool for good governance and for activating effective decision-making processes. It is an agent of change and, as demonstrates this work; it can also be encouraged by the use of multimedia technologies.

In the last few years, there are many examples of the use of Serious game and Gamification in formal contexts of education, as an instrument able to motivate and involve the user (Van den Berg, 2015).

The success of this type of approach in educational contexts is due to the fact that it supports multisensoriality, allows active participation, promotes the recovery of previous knowledge, provides immediate feedback, provides tools for an effective self-assessment and, finally, involves the community of players in the learning process allowing the realization of that sense of community very useful in the transmission and acquisition of knowledge (Papastergiour, 2009, Oblinger, 2004).

In the field of environmental education, Serious Games, in particular, allow the user to simulate the real world where the player can observe the cause-effect process (Malone & Lepper, 1987). Examples are Minecraft (https://minecraft.net/it-it/), Clean Up the River (http://cleanup.noco2.com.au/) and SeAdventure (Rossano et al, 2017 (a), Rossano et al, 2017 (b)).

The present research aims to investigate whether the use of serious games and gamification can be useful in raising awareness among young people about respect and care for the environment.

Through an exploratory study using questionnaires with multiple-choice questions or open questions, a sample of teachers of schools of all levels of the Municipality of Taranto (a city south of Italy known for its high degree of environmental degradation) who did not know both serious games and gamification was heard in order to understand their perception about the use of these devices.

The collected data has shown both the availability of teachers to use gamification and serious game for the implementation of environmental education paths especially in a deteriorate context such as Taranto, and the need to use them especially in contexts with high environmental crisis for the high impact motivational that these technologies can develop and for the awareness that they can generate in young generation.

Keywords:

Serious game, teachers, environmental education.