Sustainability Should Be Fun: Designing Board Games to Teach Sustainability

Abstract

Teaching sustainability to undergrad students, particularly those in design degrees, faces barriers when it comes to relating core concepts such as the triple bottom line (environmental, economic and social issues) or the environmental impacts of technological development with the product’s life cycle in their design process or even their daily lives. It results in difficulties to understand and apply the knowledge due to the lack of practical learning when it comes to the topic. Game-based learning has proven a good tool to raise understanding of certain topics, within a fun, flexible, and risk-free environment that enables lateral and critical thinking. Board games are an accessible way to put into practice such concepts and improve understanding through play, experimentation, interaction, and repetition, combining theory with practice, thus they could help design educators to tackle sustainability issues with their students. The aim of this paper is to present the findings of a research project whose objective was to develop and test a board game with sustainability as the main theme for use, within a framework of knowledge transfer, as learning tool in sustainable design courses at the undergrad level.



Author Information
Ricardo Victoria Uribe, Autonomous University of the State of Mexico, Mexico
Sandra Alicia Utrilla Cobos, Autonomous University of the State of Mexico, Mexico
Arturo Santamaría Ortega, Autonomous University of the State of Mexico, Mexico

Paper Information
Conference: ACSEE2017
Stream: Environmental Sustainability & Human Consumption: Human and Life Sciences

This paper is part of the ACSEE2017 Conference Proceedings (View)
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Posted by James Alexander Gordon