Game-based learning (GBL) has emerged as a powerful educational tool that leverages the inherent engagement and motivation offered by games to enhance learning outcomes (Plass et al., 2020). One of the key benefits of GBL lies in its ability to captivate learners and foster a heightened sense of engagement and motivation; game-like environments are also effective in promoting active participation and sustained interest among learners. Games provide an immersive and interactive learning environment that facilitates the transfer of knowledge and skills to real-world contexts. CIRCULAR IN PLAY comprised a series of three online GBL nights and subsequent design activities associated with international events celebrating innovation and environmental science. The primary aim of the project was to enhance participants’ awareness and knowledge of the circular economy and the accompanying socio-civic competencies in a GBL setting, while its secondary aims included enhancing knowledge about the EELISA Alliance and thus contributing to the participants’ education mobility. The first workshop, 3VIA 2022, was held on September 30th and used trivia activities regarding the three main themes of the circular economy: reduce, reuse, and recycle. Kahoot! was the primary platform for the gamification activity, and each theme was developed and delivered by a different university of the international organizing team in one main room for individual play. The second workshop, Scape Room, was held on November 18, 2022, and designed as a scientific parkour focused on the circular economy and socio-civic skills. The activities consisted of two serious games referred to as challenges: Pictionary and the Earth’s Defenders. Both challenges utilized smaller virtual rooms to conduct group work and Google Jamboard to draw and visualize ideas through collective brainstorming moderated by the participating university’s professors and researchers. The final workshop, R-Express, was held on March 13, 2023. This workshop merged the gamification and serious game methods in a challenge entitled ‘Why? What? How? When?,’ in which the participants first competed individually in short theme-based Kahoot! sessions and then engaged in groups in moderator-led incremental brainstorming over Jamboard. The principle target group of all the workshops was first- and second-year university students from the four participating countries and other EELISA Alliance member universities, whereas the audience involved both faculty and students at all levels of undergraduate and graduate study from the member universities as well as across and beyond Europe. In order to prepare the students for the GBL applications, in all workshops the challenges were preceded by short films and introductory presentations about sustainability and the circular economy and ice-breaker questions intended to emphasize the internationality of the audience. Each workshop earned the participants digital EELISA badges consisting of different SDGs and EELISA impact levels– a novel EELISA recognition framework that feeds into the GBL value of the project setting. This study employs a qualitative analysis to examine CIRCULAR IN PLAY’s activities in terms of their GBL methodology. The study will close with a critical discussion of how and with which strategies gamification and serious games were used as a learning method by the Circular EELISA Community and what kind of feedback emerged throughout the case evaluation.

AUTHORS: Aysegul Akcay Kavakoglu, Imge Akcakaya Waite, Lăcrămioara Diana Robescu, Diana Cocârţă, Liana Ioana Vuta. Filippo Corsini.