Using gamification and IoT-based educational tools towards energy savings - some experiences from two schools in Italy and Greece

Abstract

Climate change and the need for sustainable development have become part of our daily lives. In this context, it is crucial to involve the educational community to the discussion, both students and teachers; by increasing awareness about these issues and the ways school communities can contribute to energy savings, we can kick-start a change towards more sustainable practices in our societies. The Green Awareness in Action (GAIA) H2020 research project implemented an IoT-based approach in several European schools for sustainability awareness and energy efficiency, while at the same time aiming for increasing students' digital skills. By using gamification, competitions and IoT-based educational activities, GAIA engaged directly with teachers and students in order to realize energy-saving activities in their environment. We report here on the use of gamification and competition among schools in this context, and how they helped together with IoT-based lab activities to engage students and educators to participate in the project more actively. We provide details on the implementation of GAIA's intervention in specific school settings to showcase our approach. Our findings, backed up by evaluation data and answers to a survey by 30 educators in Greece and Italy, confirm that the inclusion of competition and gamification aspects can significantly increase students' engagement, especially when having groups/schools competing with each other. Moreover, IoT-based educational activities can supplement existing educational activities in interesting ways, with students evaluating positively the experience and educators reporting increased overall student engagement in their class during the intervention period, and, on average, better class performance compared to previous periods.

Gamifying Decision Support Systems to Promote Inclusive and Engaged Urban Resilience Planning

“…Moreover, there was a lack of DSSs with a community design focus that would allow users to interact with and augment the private and public green spaces in their neighborhoods. The implementation of Utilizing technology (VR or augmented GAME4CITY reality [AR]) Ikigailand (Bhardwaj et al, 2020) Facilitating community discussions Community Circles (Thiel et al, 2019) Promoting continued engagement Land.Info Rewards-based incentives Cool Choices (Ro et al, 2017) Diversity of participants Global Sustainability Crossroads (Capellán-Pérez et al, 2019) Education Socialized learning GAIA Challenge (Mylonas, Hofstaetter, et al, 2021;Mylonas, Paganelli, et al, 2021) Providing players with informed Maladaptation Game (Asplund et al,…”

“…For example, Greenify is an online social media platform that promotes peer-to-peer learning on how lifestyle choices can affect the climate (Lee et al, 2013). Similarly, the GAIA Challenge (Mylonas, Hofstaetter, et al, 2021;Mylonas, Paganelli, et al, 2021) was designed for in-school sustainability education by providing a platform for cross-class participation where students compete with different schools and track progress through leaderboards. Socializing gamification, in addition to providing further motivation through interaction with peers, appears to increase climate change knowledge (including mitigation and adaptation efforts), as well as strengthening the affective (emotional) aspects of public engagement, e.g., interest, concern, personal responsibility, cooperation, and empathy (Galeote et al, 2021).…”

Visiones sobre la gamificación como estrategia metodológica inclusiva en educación primaria

“…Entre las potencialidades de la gamificación se señala que es una estrategia metodológica que favorece una mayor autonomía y un rendimiento más óptimo en las actividades educativas (Obando-Bastidas et al, 2018;Villegas et al, 2018). Facilita la atención a la diversidad del alumnado (López et al 2022;Pinedo et al, 2018;Rodríguez, et al, 2019;Smith & Schamroth, 2019;Vidal et al, 2018), al permitir la fragmentación de metas más grandes en pequeños objetivos que se retroalimentan en un tiempo breve, algo que, como apuntan Muñoz et al (2016), Mylonas et al (2021) y Vergara et al (2018) mejorará su implicación y participación en el desarrollo del proceso de enseñanza y aprendizaje.…”

Gamification-less: may gamification really foster civic participation? A controlled field experiment

“…Gamified applications have been proposed to encourage people to make suggestions to improve the community life (Stembert and Mulder 2013), to improve the communication between city hall public services and people (Rodrigues et al 2019), to foster young students to care more about sustainability and energy savings (Mylonas et al 2021) or to be prepared to face crisis situations (Kanat et al 2013). While such systems suggest that gamification may be applied to foster civic participation, as revealed in (Seaborn and Fels 2015), there is still a lack of data or standards to measure the gamification effects and results that prove the advantage of gamified systems respect to non-gamified ones.…”