Abstract:

Due to the sustainability challenges and consequent goals set by today’s societies, we thought it would be interesting to make our own contribution by drawing attention of our students, in a non-traditional way, to such problems through educational games that promote renewable energies, climate change awareness and the increase of biodiversity. We stress that the School of Technology and Management (ESTIG), of Beja’s Polytechnique Institute, is involved in the Eco-Schools Project, so the contribution of the academic community can be felt on several levels, from good ecological practices to the development of platforms that can contribute to such practices. Thus, we started the Project "Environmental Education", which consists in the creation of "a more sustainable school", for instance, through finding the best solutions to minimize the expenses of electricity, paper, water, among other indicators in the ESTIG building. Through the curricular unit "Integrated Project" of the Computer Engineering Course, with the participation of the 3rd year students, we have developed a game that takes place in a 3D model of ESTIG’s facility. In order to develop this game, the students used the software Unity, since it utilizes the WebGL plugin (enabling the game to be played in the WEB), uses a SQLite database, and provides a good 3D gameplay experience.

The main goal of the game is to make ESTIG more efficient. In order to do so, three use cases were developed: the installation of solar panels (on the roof of the building and the ESTIG's car park), the implementation of light bulbs with Light Emitting Diode (LED) technology, and presence sensors that turn on the corridor lights. This allows players to make a simulation of financial and electricity savings, with implications on the initial budget and score. The control metrics are calculated according to the player's actions, which can be either positive or negative, through replacing the previous lights with LED lights and/or by adding motion sensors, and/or placing solar panels. During the testing phase of the game, we concluded that in certain tasks the players had some difficulties in understanding how the game worked, mainly in the implementation of motion sensors and solar panels. The change to LED bulbs allowed us to verify that the electricity costs decreased, however, the same cannot be said regarding solar panels and motion sensors, as the data, for now, does not allow us to verify the cost/benefit of these changes. We hope to have more data soon that will allow us to validate these changes. However, we believe that the game will develop the ability to verify the benefits that these transformations will have on the ESTIG building, allowing decision makers to make these modifications.

Keywords:

Educational games 3D, renewable energy, recycling, climate change, sustainable school.