Experimenting with a novel sustainability education course for secondary schools: the D.Game, YOUth play the future

This paper reports the preliminary findings of an ongoing research funded by EIT Climate-KIC that aims at creating a novel sustainability course for secondary schools in Finland, Spain, and Italy, and experimenting with a participative governance model for schoolchildren. The study analyses two short new sustainability courses for secondary school teachers and students in order to compare their impact on some of the key precursors of environmental behaviour and leadership. On the one hand, the D.Game focuses on cultural values, collaboration and hope as levers of change for sustainability. On the other, the Young Innovators standard training focuses on systemic innovation with the guidance of visual tools for systems thinking.

We investigated the impact of the D.Game/standard Young Innovators courses on teachers (N=142) and students (N=121) through a randomized controlled trial and a pre-experiment (one-group pre-post design) respectively. The initial results of the teachers study show that the D.Game training was more effective in promoting a change in self-transcendence values whereas the standard Young Innovators programme was more effective in reducing positive attitudes towards the exploitation of natural resources. On the other hand, the students study revealed that the D.Game program was effective in reducing positive attitudes towards the exploitation of natural resources among the youngest students (Age ≤14).