EduCITY as a smart learning city environment towards education for sustainability: work in progress

Abstract

Education for sustainability is a relevant goal worldwide. One way to promote it, according to the literature, is to explore emergent active learning approaches, such as mobile learning, augmented reality, and games. This work-in-progress study presents an approach to develop a smart learning city environment towards changes in citizens’ sustainable development competences, the EduCITY. Its innovation is to address a new action-oriented transformative pedagogy for the development of key sustainable development competencies, by using smart technology, as mobile Augmented Reality games grounded on challenging paths in the city, co-created by the community. The project fits a pragmatic paradigm, where mixed methods are used in a design-based research approach, comprising successive evaluative cycles for refinement and improvement of the technological prototypes: the app and the game creation web platform. The evaluation of the technology-enhanced intervention is made through observation and inquiry techniques. Several outputs of the project were already developed, even though some will be continuously updated throughout the project, namely, the project’s website, and the technology component of the smart learning city environment. Future work includes several cycles of analysing and testing the technological prototypes and the development of games with students, teachers, and other non-programmers for education for sustainability.