Designing Adaptable Playful Experiences for Climate Engagement: Lessons from NEUROCLIMA Play Ecosystem

Abstract

Climate change constitutes a complex phenomenon that impacts various aspects of human life. Consequently, climate literacy and engagement are inherently multifaceted and multi-contextual as well. Climate change engagement therefore requires educational tools and resources that can reach diverse audiences across formal, informal, and community-based settings. While playful learning experiences have gained increasing attention as mechanisms for climate education and engagement, many are often designed for specific contexts, limiting their adaptability and flexibility of reuse. This paper presents a design case study of the NEUROCLIMA Play ecosystem, a playful climate engagement ecosystem comprising the NEUROCLIMA Play interactive learning modules and ClimateQuest, a physical board game, designed to support climate knowledge, discussion, and collaborative engagement around climate-related challenges across multiple learning environments. This study argues that designing for adaptability should be considered a core objective in the development of playful experiences intended to support climate awareness and engagement. Drawing on project documentation and design artefacts, this study analyses the design process, reflecting on key development decisions, and challenges encountered during the development process to examine how adaptability was addressed as a central design concern. The analysis identifies key design challenges related to diverse audiences, multiple contexts of use, different facilitator profiles, scientific accuracy and playability, shows how these challenges were addressed and then proposes practice-informed design principles for designing adaptable playful climate engagement experiences. The findings contribute to the growing literature on serious games and playful learning for climate literacy, engagement and societal impact by providing practical guidance for researchers, educators, and practitioners seeking to design playful interventions that can be deployed across a range of educational and public engagement contexts.