Teaching a Serious Game for the Sustainable Development Goals in the Scratch Programming Tool

Abstract

This work proposes an educational scenario of game-based learning. The scenario is based on a novel serious game, that gets high school students acquainted with the Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs) and promotes the development of their computational thinking skills. Game-based learning is built upon collaborative problem solving and evolves around an interactive story augmented with small quests/inquiries. Students work together to navigate the serious game on the SDGs. As students complete SDGs-related quests/inquiries, the story evolves. The challenge is a game expansion with custom settings (backdrops/avatars) that will take place in Scratch, allowing students to differentiate their learning path. For the game, that was developed in Scratch visual programming environment, this works suggests an educational scenario and indicative student activities for hybrid (synchronous and asynchronous) education. Using the Flipped Classroom instructional strategy, the scenario starts asynchronously, unfolds synchronously, and is completed asynchronously. The proposed serious game follows the guided discovery method for the acquaintance with the SDGs and the accompanying educational scenario aims for students to acquire the required programming skills to develop a small interactive application on the SDGs. Through game expansion challenge students hone their programming skills in a purposeful and entertaining way. An evaluation by students concludes the work.