Engineering Educational Games for a Sustainable Society

This book explores innovative approaches to educational game development, emphasizing practical solutions and transformative learning experiences. As learning increasingly converges with digital culture, game-based learning and serious games offer compelling ways to spark curiosity, cultivate systems thinking and resilience, and create inclusive, sustainable educational experiences.

The book is organized into three parts, Play, Learn, and Transform, which are deliberately interwoven, reflecting the fluid and iterative nature of game-based learning as a holistic approach to education and social change. First, Play advocates for a transformation in educational paradigms towards active, experiential, and playful learning methodologies. The four chapters showcase a variety of strategies to stimulate engagement, starting with hybrid settings and concluding with digital scenarios. Next, Learn delves into the intersection of educational game design and sustainability. Here, the chapters challenge conventional paradigms by introducing more-than-human perspectives, co-creative approaches, and immersive narratives. Lastly, Transform moves towards the broader societal impact of serious games, highlighting their potential in shaping policy, fostering inclusion, and enhancing public understanding of environmental and governance issues. The chapters in this part underscore how games engage diverse audiences and support collaborative learning and reveal how they can become platforms for collective inquiry, systemic reflection, and social change.

This book is intended for those committed to advancing education through purposeful play, whether being a researcher seeking theoretical insights, an educator designing a curriculum or a class intervention, or a developer building the next generation of educational tools. Collectively, the works in this volume reaffirm that game-based learning is not merely a pedagogical technique but a medium for meaningful exploration, practicing collaboration, and supporting transformative learning.

Antonio Bucchiarone is currently an Associate Professor at the University of L’Aquila and Visiting Fellow at Bruno Kessler Foundation (FBK) in Trento, Italy. His research activity is focused on many aspects of Software Engineering for Adaptive Socio-Technical Systems. He has investigated advanced methodologies and techniques supporting the definition and development of gameful systems in different domains (i.e., education, sustainable mobility, etc.) where being adaptable is a key intrinsic characteristic.

Valentina Rossi is a Pedagogical Advisor at the Swiss Federal Institute of Technology in Lausanne (EPFL), Switzerland, where she coaches teachers to improve the quality of education. As part of the 3T PLAY research project, she designed, facilitated and evaluated activities that combine tangible objects and a playful approach for teaching transversal skills to engineering students. Her current research focuses on integrating sustainability and ethics in the STEM curriculum.

Vanissa Wanick is a Senior Lecturer in Interaction Design at Winchester School of Art at the University of Southampton in the UK, where she teaches games design methods and innovative applications of interaction design to support collective decision-making. She is also a Fellow of the Higher Education Academy (FHEA). Her research interests include participatory design, creative research methods in Human-Computer Interaction, game design, player agency and creative resilience.