A Playful Path to Sustainability: Synthesizing design strategies for children's environmental sustainability learning through gameful interventions

The climate crisis has created a time of great uncertainty for children and their futures, raising need for new approaches that support children to learn about environmental sustainability (ES) and prepare them for living with climate impacts. Systematic reviews of IDC have highlighted instances of gameful interventions (i.e., game-based learning (GBL), gamification, and game-authoring) that offer meaningful ES learning opportunities, but there is not yet a comprehensive synthesis of how this is achieved. Our paper reports on a systematic review of 39 interventions to interrogate how gameful interventions are designed to foster children's ES learning. Our results contribute four themes: “GBL genres fostering distinct forms of ES understanding”, “gamification as a reinforcer to children's sustainable action”, “game-authoring allowing children to voice their perspectives to critical audiences”, and “transversal skills embedded in gameful interventions”. Based on these findings, the paper proposes design implications for future research in gameful interventions and ES.