"THE BEST SCHOOL DAY EVER" - TEACHING SUSTAINABILITY AND SYSTEM THINKING BY PERVASIVE GAME PLAYING

"The best school day ever" was a comment from one of the children in 5th grade elementary school after a day of pervasive game playing in school. The children hardly noticed the learning when playing, but tests after the game reveled thorough knowledge acquiring in Sustainability and System Thinking. The task was simple; game development students from a university course in game design and system thinking were asked to developed and test a pervasive game for teaching sustainability and systems thinking to children in elementary school. The overall game goal was to "sneak in" learning while the children were having fun. This paper focus on two aspects of the project; firstly the development process done by the university game students, and secondly the game days in the elementary school where children played the game. Pervasive games (PG) are an emerging genre of games, blending the real world and games in new and exciting ways. PG has many properties that make them suitable for learning. They do, for example, facilitate collaboration, learning just in time and creative problem solving. In addition, they provide a natural environment for the problems that should be solved and the theory the players have to study. System thinking is about discovering causal connections between different variables, and understanding how different components in the world are connected to make a system. Sustainability is about the capacity of Earth to endure human life, and is an important part of the Norwegian elementary school curriculum. The learning goals were taken from the Norwegian Core Curriculum and Subject Curricula.