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Serious Game Design to Promote Energy Literacy Among Younger Children

Published: 15 February 2021 Publication History

Abstract

Today's children are tomorrow's home owners and policymakers. Engaging children with energy literacy can help equip them with the knowledge, skills and environmentally sustainable attitudes needed in later life. This paper discusses the development of a serious game called Power Pets designed to help children understand where energy comes from, how to save energy, and its connection to the environment. In the game, children adopt a digital pet that they care for by feeding it saved energy accumulated during gameplay as they complete energy saving tasks. In one of the few qualitative studies involving children to date, we investigated the potential of Power Pets to increase engagement with energy literacy with a specific age group between the ages of 5 and 9. Our findings suggest Power Pets provided preliminary indications for improvements in children's understanding of energy saving and the link between energy saving and the environment, both at a cognitive and affective level, however usability and the steep developmental curve in this age group are key considerations.

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  • (2024)A Playful Path to Sustainability: Synthesizing design strategies for children's environmental sustainability learning through gameful interventionsProceedings of the 23rd Annual ACM Interaction Design and Children Conference10.1145/3628516.3655797(201-217)Online publication date: 17-Jun-2024
  • (2024)The role of CCI in supporting children’s engagement with environmental sustainability at a time of climate crisisInternational Journal of Child-Computer Interaction10.1016/j.ijcci.2023.10060538:COnline publication date: 27-Feb-2024
  • (2023)Games for Change—A Comparative Systematic Review of Persuasive Strategies in Games for Behavior ChangeIEEE Transactions on Games10.1109/TG.2022.315909015:2(121-133)Online publication date: Jun-2023
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cover image ACM Other conferences
OzCHI '20: Proceedings of the 32nd Australian Conference on Human-Computer Interaction
December 2020
764 pages
Permission to make digital or hard copies of all or part of this work for personal or classroom use is granted without fee provided that copies are not made or distributed for profit or commercial advantage and that copies bear this notice and the full citation on the first page. Copyrights for components of this work owned by others than ACM must be honored. Abstracting with credit is permitted. To copy otherwise, or republish, to post on servers or to redistribute to lists, requires prior specific permission and/or a fee. Request permissions from [email protected]

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Association for Computing Machinery

New York, NY, United States

Publication History

Published: 15 February 2021

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Author Tags

  1. Child Computer Interaction
  2. Digital Learning
  3. Energy Literacy
  4. Interaction Design

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  • Research-article
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  • Refereed limited

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  • Advance Queensland

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OzCHI '20

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Overall Acceptance Rate 362 of 729 submissions, 50%

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Cited By

View all
  • (2024)A Playful Path to Sustainability: Synthesizing design strategies for children's environmental sustainability learning through gameful interventionsProceedings of the 23rd Annual ACM Interaction Design and Children Conference10.1145/3628516.3655797(201-217)Online publication date: 17-Jun-2024
  • (2024)The role of CCI in supporting children’s engagement with environmental sustainability at a time of climate crisisInternational Journal of Child-Computer Interaction10.1016/j.ijcci.2023.10060538:COnline publication date: 27-Feb-2024
  • (2023)Games for Change—A Comparative Systematic Review of Persuasive Strategies in Games for Behavior ChangeIEEE Transactions on Games10.1109/TG.2022.315909015:2(121-133)Online publication date: Jun-2023
  • (2022)Review of Demand Response and Energy Communities in Serious GamesIEEE Access10.1109/ACCESS.2022.320201310(91018-91026)Online publication date: 2022

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