Towards the complete gamification of an "Environmental Impact Assessment" MSc teaching course

The teaching course ‘Environmental Impact Assessment’ is included in the master’s degree (2nd cycle degree) programs of ‘Human and Natural sciences’ and ‘Geological sciences and technologies’ of the University of Firenze (Italy). The course covers a multisciplinary program, including the following topics: EIA regulations, characterization of environmental components, identification of the possible sources of interference from human activities, resulting impacts, definition of possible measures of mitigation and compensation. Given the master's degree topics, the course doeas not cover sociological, political and psichological aspects (which may be relevant during EIA procedures). As a consequence, for several years now, the course has been complemented by a role playing game session (Segoni, 2022), in which the students play the roles of different characters involveved in a public debate concerning a geothermal plant project and learn how contrasting objectives, political reasons and communication strategies (sadly) may be more important than technical analysises when taking a decision about public works. During the years, this activity has always been very successful, therefore other elements of gamification have been progressively added to the lessons of the teaching course. The gamification elements include some playful collaborative activities concieved by the teacher and some games presented at the "Games for Geosciences" session during past EGU General Assemblies, such as "Cranky Uncle" (Winkler and Cook, 2022) (used for the lesson about climate change and related impacts) and "Dirty Matters" (Burak and Van Midden, 2023) (used in place of a frontal lesson to explain soil properties, impacts and mitigation measures). Last year, almost 50% of the lessons were interested by gamification elements and two lessons were actually turned into game sessions.  

This work summarizes the gamification process, reports on the feedback received from the students, gives credit to the colleagues whose games were introduced in the course, and seeks advices from the audience to further advance the gamification process of the course.     

 

References

Burak, E. and Van Midden, C.: Dirty Matters: The Soil Game, EGU General Assembly 2023, Vienna, Austria, 24–28 Apr 2023, EGU23-17593, https://doi.org/10.5194/egusphere-egu23-17593, 2023. 

Segoni, S.: A role-playing game to complement teaching activities in an ‘environmental impact assessment’teaching course, Environmental Research Communications, 4(5), 051003, 2022.

Winkler, B., and Cook, J. : Cranky Uncle-a multi-lingual critical thinking game to build resilience against climate misinformation, EGU General Assembly 2022, Vienna, Austria, 2022.