SUSTAINABILITY HUB: a virtual world island to teach Agenda 2030 and Sustainability

A virtual world island called Sustainability Hub is described, residing in a virtual world focused on STEM (Techland) created by one of the author as a teaching tool for 11-14 years old students.  Techland is based on the 3D platform Opensimulator, widely used to build virtual scenarios and learning environments accessed by users in forms of avatars.
Sustainability Hub focuses on Sustainability and Agenda 2030. The learning path is composed of six thematic areas, each one devoted to a specific topic:
-Welcome area for students’ and teachers’ training and orienteering
-Global issues area, where are explained  the main issues humans have to face, like climate change, loss of biodiversity, over exploitation of georesources, world population growth and so on.
-Georesources and circular economy, where the importance of recycling waste and favoring circular economy in industrial processes is highlighted. 
-Environmental footprint indicators area, focused on the tools used to measure the impact of human activities on planet Earth, like carbon-, water-, ecological footprint and the Material Flow Indicator called also Ecological Rucksack
-Agenda 2030 and Sustainable Development Goals area, which shows the timeline path to the approval of Agenda 2030 in 2015 and the description of all Sustainable Development Goals and Targets.
-Sustainable City Game area represents the final part of the experience, where students/avatars can play a virtual version of a sort of the Goose game trying to solve quizzes and challenges on topics related to the themes treated in the Hub.
In each zone multimedia presentations, links to external websites, videos and online games are present. Various interactive 3D objects, when clicked, perform animations that explain abstract concepts, data and facts or allow practical activities such as the calculation of the carbon footprint. 
Students explore the learning environment consulting documents and interacting with the 3D objects (gamification approach). At the end of each area students have to solve a quiz to acquire a badge and continue to the next section.
The island has been experimented during the pandemic lockdown with 136 students (11-14 years old) that accessed the world from home. Pre- and post-activity questionnaires were administered, showing good results in the cognitive test and appreciation of the activity in the satisfaction survey. In particular, they were happy to make practical activities in the forced online teaching period, improving socialization in the difficult pandemic time, feeling close to their classmates.