Learning eco-friendly food choice using extended reality

Eco-friendly food choice requires that human individuals relate themselves and their natural environment to each other. They may establish this human-environment relation by experiencing their food choices being accompanied by negative or positive changes of an eco-system. Hence, educating human individuals by enabling them to such human-environment experiences may foster their eco- friendly food choice. Yet, this would require inducing climate-related environmental changes on purpose that immediately follow one’s choice of food. We have, therefore, developed an immersive virtual reality (VR) type of extended reality consisting in a life-sized 3D virtual environment in which grabbing food is accompanied by climate-related environmental changes or their reversal depending on the food’s carbon footprint. A promising opportunity for using this EcoVR to teach eco-friendly food choice to a rather large part of society may be in lower secondary education. We have therefore started to investigate the utility of this EcoVR for this educational level with teachers and learners. In a first study, we have asked experienced secondary school teachers to test EcoVR and to rate its educational usefulness. In a second study, we have explored if EcoVR can serve teenagers for learning. The findings of the first study suggest that the teachers regard EcoVR to be useful for teaching climate- friendly food consumption. Moreover, they regard this educational usefulness of EcoVR to be higher than that of its PC version. In accordance with this the results of the second study suggest that the teenagers learn eco-friendly food choice more rapidly using EcoVR than using its PC version. Hence, in lower secondary education EcoVR may have the potential to serve pupils for learning climate- friendly food choice. Moreover, it may serve as a digital bridge or metaverse between the learning of relevant skills in school and the application of these skills in daily life.