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

The NEUROCLIMA Play ecosystem, a playful climate engagement tool combining six interactive learning modules with the ClimateQuest board game, serves as the basis for a reflective design case study on what makes such resources adaptable. Its central claim is that adaptability across audiences, contexts, facilitators, content, and engagement modes, rather than the mere presence of game elements, determines whether playful climate education can move between formal classrooms, informal learning settings, and community programs. The work situates this argument within existing literature on serious games and climate education.

Analysis proceeds through a challenge-response-principle framework that identifies four core design challenges: reconciling scientific accuracy with playability for diverse audiences, enabling reuse across formal, informal, and community contexts, supporting facilitators without specialist expertise, and treating adaptability as a central rather than peripheral design concern. From these, the authors derive practice-informed principles, including audience-sensitive design, modular and contextual reuse, and facilitation flexibility. These principles are offered as reflective insights drawn from development practice rather than validated guidelines, since the study does not evaluate learning outcomes or participant experience empirically.

The scope is bounded to the design process of a single ecosystem, with the reference base spanning publications from 2012 to 2026 on serious games, playful learning, and climate education. The cited literature reinforces a recognized gap in the field: calls for more rigorous evaluation of climate-focused serious games and for longitudinal, multi-country studies of playful sustainability interventions remain largely unmet. The principles presented therefore serve as a foundation for hypothesis-building and future testing, not as established evidence of effectiveness.