Abstract:

According to the 4.7 target of the United Nation Agenda 2030, education is one of the crucial keys to drive the social transformation towards sustainability. Digital literacy is an important skill of the XXI century and can be an engaging tool to address topics dealing with sustainability among students.

Due to the COVID-19 pandemic, schools facing distance learning struggle with preserving human interactions among the school community. The use of virtual environments can partially overcome this issue, allowing teachers to set up synchronous collaborative activities and group communication with a sense of presence. The rising need of such virtual environments gives a good opportunity for development of different topics on various platforms.

This work focuses on an Opensimulator-based virtual island dedicated to sustainability topics and Agenda 2030 goals, called Sustainability Hub. Teachers and students can access the world as avatars through a graphical user interface and interact with objects and others avatars.

Sustainability Hub is structured in five sections (actual scenario, resources, sustainability indicators, the Agenda 2030 Goals, the sustainability City Game) which can be followed both sequentially and randomly. In each section there are preliminary interactive objects, multimedia presentations, links to external resources, online games, and engaging questions and practical activities for students. At the end of each section, it is possible to solve an interactive quiz, getting a badge to verify new pupils’ competencies.

The experimentation was carried out with middle school students, who accessed Sustainability Hub from their home. After an initial training to master how to move and interact in the world, students were free to explore the educational paths for two hours and were involved in various activities.

At the end of the experimentation both satisfaction questionnaire and final test were delivered to students to verify the acquisition of new skills regarding the sustainability topics, and their engagement in the activities. Results show high degree of interest, participation and “the sense of the presence” among pupils. In addition, the final test shows better scores for the experimental group with respect to the control group who explored the Sustainability Hub solely in screen sharing mode.

Keywords:

Sustainability, Agenda2030, Opensimulator.