As identified in documents such as the UNESCO Roadmap for Implementing the Global Action Programme on Education for Sustainable Development (2015), “Education for Sustainable Development (ESD) is about shaping a better tomorrow for all – and it must start today.” Within this same document, it is identified under the priority action for building capacities of educators and trainers, that ESD should be “integrated into pre-service and in-service education and training for early childhood, primary and secondary school teachers, as well as teachers and facilitators in non-formal and informal education” and that “Educators are one of the most important levers to foster educational change and to facilitate learning for sustainable development”. The proposed project will therefore develop a digital game, along with associated guidelines, good practice guides and training material to innovate and support improvements for students, and teachers and others within primary and secondary school systems– specifically in the areas of sustainability and environmental education. The primary project result will be a game, aimed at delivery of the afore-mentioned skills and knowledge through a Game-Based-Learning methodology, which will serve concurrently as a tool for teaching, simulation, practice and assessment. The proposed game and associated resources are ultimately suggested as elements which can be integrated as a common learning resources within a wide variety of contexts for primary and secondary school education. It will be possible to use the game as a stand-alone and largely automated resource or one which can be embedded into a larger curriculum, with guidelines and other resources being provided for its integration in a variety of classroom and training situations The project team will achieve these goals in compliance with the program priorities for innovating and increasing the quality and range of initial and continuing training, including new pedagogies, ICT-based methodologies and use of open educational resources as well as the production and adoption of open education resources in diverse European languages. The activities the strategic partnership will organize will follow the logical framework of the project implementation and progress and include: management, coordination and monitoring activities; activities dedicated to the production of the Intellectual Outputs and achieving the set objectives and outcomes and activities for dissemination, exploitation and provision of sustainability. Research in which thorough research and analysis of the current "state of the art" of environmental and sustainable education in Europe will be conducted. This state of the art report will also include main conclusions and recommendations for facilitating environmental and sustainable education in primary and secondary schools. Following this, learning content will be developed for the subject-specific, transferable competencies for sustainability education and structured in such a way that this content can be integrated and taught through a digital game. The developed game and appropriate educational assets will be iteratively designed, developed, tested and refined in order to create a highly-polished final product which will reside amongst worldwide commercial and educational games. Additionally, a "toolkit" for teachers containing guides, best practices and associated educational material will be developed to help educators in integrating the game in an educational setting. All resources will be hosted on an online platform, to function largely as a teacher/trainer support tool. Additionally, face to face and online training will be provided for primary and secondary students to help them integrate all project results into their educational activites. The project is expected to have a significant impact on individual educators and their organisations across Europe, largely related to the developed game and resources as a means of providing a new and innovative approach to promoting sustainability and developing related skills in schools. It is anticipated that the resources developed during the project will complement and expand existing training initiatives at various educational levels across Europe and expand traditional teaching and learning practices to include new technologies. The project is expected to offer opportunities for the exchange of ideas and good practices with peers from across Europe through the proposed multiplier event, training sessions and the online platform.
As identified in the initial project proposal, the Promoting Green Games project sought to develop an educational digital game & associated resources to innovate & support improvements in the area of sustainability education in schools, along with a toolkit for teachers to aid in the integration of this game in the classroom. The project achieved this primary goal by creating a game & associated resources to support the introduction, integration & support of sustainability (&/ or climate action) education & activity within schools for both students & for teachers. The developed project outputs have been subject to testing, feedback & re-development a number of times over the course of the project to align them as closely as possible to the needs of the target audience & education sector & the main outputs (primarily the game & associated training material) are currently freely available on all major mobile formats & in public repositories such as the iOS store & Google play store. Feedback from pilot participants indicated an extremely positive opinion towards the use of the game for teaching & learning. The project has exceeded expectation in a number of key areas. In particular, the project has developed a large number of resources, beyond the initial targeted expectations identified in the project proposal. In particular, the project has developed a number of online platforms (3 in total, beyond the single platform - O5 - defined in the proposal) in order to diversify and promote the individual elements of the project - the developed project game (http://penjiithegame.com/), the teacher back-end supporting the game (https://teachers.penjiithegame.com/) and the "official" online platform housing all developed resources (http://greenskillsgame.eu/). The project has developed a large and varied amount of training material as part of the game development process and has made this material across multiple formats and media, ranging from the in-game learning resources to classroom-based posters, to online animations. The project has developed an innovative digital game, which not only serves as an engaging tool for supplying and raising awareness about key sustainability/ climate action areas - including climate change, plastic pollution, biodiversity, the SDGs, climate justice, household water, food and energy waste - but has, as part of this development, created an innovative approach supporting sustainability and climate action education in which Game-Based-Learning can be used as part of a flipped classroom approach to support climate action education inside of and outside of the classroom and which can ultimately support teachers and students in creating genuine impact and action. This innovative approach arises from the presence of a “Teacher Back-End”, linked to the developed digital game, through which teachers can release specific levels to students so that students can learn about one or more of the 4 key climate action areas covered by the game - either in-class or outside the classroom. Teachers can then further build on students’ in-game learning by accessing a range of curated existing climate action education resources, alongside bespoke climate action education resources developed as part of the project, through the teacher back-end website and/ or project game website in order to deepen student learning through in-class activities and supports. Teachers can also, as a fourth step, utilise a database of climate action initiatives aimed at primary and secondary schools available on the the game website and teacher back-end to identify suitable initiatives which their students and/ or schools can become involved in, in order to create genuine impact. The project results have been validated with a large audience - primarily the key target audience of teachers and students in primary and secondary schools, but also with organisations/ institutions charged with supporting sustainability/ climate action education alongside policy makers, education representatives, public representatives, etc. Feedback on the project outputs has been uniformly positive and ongoing activities look to embed the resources in the area of sustainability/ climate action education for schools across Europe. The project was widely disseminated to a large range of participants across multiple channels locally, nationally, across Europe and internationally - through face-to-face meetings, conferences, festivals and events, through piloting activities and trainings and through a wide range of online means. The developed project outputs are freely available and have been developed and provided so that they remain freely available indefinitely on open online portals such as the Google Play store and Apple iOS store, (where the digital game has currently amassed in excess of 500 downloads), maximising access and visibility not only to the target audience, but to the general public as well.