We Energy Game: Promoting Game-Based Learning as an Innovative Strategy to Educate on Energy Transition

Abstract

Countries around the world are expected to speed up the process of an energy transition towards cleaner energy solutions as a way to achieve sustainability and fight against climate change. Education plays an important role in this process, informing and increasing understanding on the benefits and challenges of energy efficiency and renewable energy, especially among young people. In search of innovative approaches, there is increasing attention for game-based learning as an innovative education strategy among scholars and practitioners. In this paper, we present "We-Energy Game" as an innovative educational strategy which makes use of game-based learning to create understanding on the challenges in the provision of affordable energy from renewable sources for an entire town. In addition to introducing the game, a study is presented on the effects of the game on students´ awareness on the energy transition, self-efficacy, and collective efficacy. For that purpose, a survey is conducted with 100 bachelor (Dutch and international) students aged between 18 and 30 years old, at Hanze University of Applied Sciences, before and after playing the game. We also conducted a group discussion with a smaller group of students to understand their opinion about the game. Results reveal an increase in awareness about the energy transition: in a smaller degree, we observe slightly increase in collective efficacy compared to self-efficacy. From the group discussion, findings reveal that the game makes students reflect on the complexity of the process and need for collaboration among different stakeholders.

SynErGame: Gamified Knowledge Building on Synchronizing Energy Supply and Energy Demand

“…Game-based learning approaches are well known and commonly used in manufacturing, especially with lean manufacturing and digitalized manufacturing (Teichmann et al, 2020;Yesilyurt et al, 2019). Regarding the energy sector, there are games on policy issues (Suzuki et al, 2021), renewable energy generation (Ouariachi et al, 2019), and power grid operation (TenneT, 2020). However, these games focus on power supply, while power demand is only considered to a small extent.…”