“How can we make our city climate-friendly?”

Serious gaming as a contribution to sustainability education

Abstract

This article presents a project aimed at developing a so-called ‘serious game’ that combines the themes of climate adaptation and the energy transition within an urban planning scenario for (younger) school pupils. The educational objectives are to raise awareness of climate change and the energy transition using real-life examples, and to foster skills such as an understanding of systems, forward thinking and collaborative problem-solving. The article outlines the iterative development process of the game and addresses the didactic and pedagogical challenge of developing a coherent game concept and an engaging game design, whilst conveying scientifically accurate technical and factual knowledge without reducing the complexity beyond what is professionally justifiable. To this end, an interdisciplinary team of experts from various fields (science, planning and didactics) was assembled, which incorporated the pupils’ perspective through several feedback loops. The focus is on target-group-oriented preparation for the two age groups 8 to 10 years (primary level) and 11 to 14 years (lower secondary level) – an aspect that has received little attention to date in research on the development processes of serious games. Building on this, experiences and feedback from the pilot studies, as well as initial findings from the accompanying didactic evaluations at one primary school and three secondary schools, will be reported and put forward for discussion.