DEEPER COMPREHENSION OF BASIC ENVIRONMENTAL ISSUES THROUGH SERIOUS GAME

Abstract

AbstractDuring the last three decades we observe growing use of ecodesign, but we observe also misuse of ecodesign methods, leading often to time and financial loss. In coherence with several failure analysis and with our observation, we base our work on a hypothesis: Misuse of ecodesign is often caused by lack of basic comprehension of environmental issues: Non linearity of the processes, their inertia and their excessive costs.Building on this hypothesis, we decided to enhance our education program with an innovative serious game. The goal is to achieve comprehension of the basic environmental issues. Innovation of the game lies in revealing to students at the end of the game, that the fictive initial situation of the game corresponded to a starting point of a real catastrophe. Students can thus not only compare their decisions with those of real leaders, but also to understand how and why bad decisions were taken.Experiments indicate that students who played the game tend to evaluate environmental problems, while those who followed a lecture tend to describe them. This trend (going further than to a description) seems to be useful in decision making and in deployment of ecodesign methods.