Education for sustainable mobility in Slovenia: Using gamification to influence the travel habits of children

Abstract

The ever-increasing mobility of modern society has a number of negative effects on space, the environment, health and quality of life. It is therefore crucial to raise awareness of the importance of sustainable mobility, part of which is effective and comprehensive education of children. The article presents some key findings of the Sustainable Mobility in Preschools and Primary Schools project, carried out in the period 2019–2021. We investigated whether gamified activities can change students' travel habits and whether the change in travel habits is influenced by their age. The study is based on the survey data from 28,043 primary school students (grades 1–9) across 220 schools (77.7% in rural, 22.3% in urban settlements). Employing paired-samples t-tests and one-way analysis of variance, the study evaluated the impact of gamified activities on travel habits. The results show that children can significantly change their traveling habits with the help of gamification. Although the greatest change in travel habits occurred during the implementation of the activity, the results suggest that more lasting effects can also be achieved. Furthermore, younger participants displayed greater responsiveness to the gamified interventions compared to their older counterparts. This research enhances the corpus of knowledge pertaining to educational strategies for sustainable mobility by providing insights from one of the largest projects to investigate the influence of gamified activities on children's commuting habits.