Symbiosis: Environmental Role-Playing Game on Student Learning Space

Symbiosis is an environmental role-playing game co-created by 3 teachers, 11 students and supported by 27 organisations. It aims to create awareness on the importance of keeping our environment clean and green in an engaging way. Symbiosis is hosted on Student Learning Space (SLS) and accessible by all smart devices.

The Symbiosis project is a ground-up initiative led by the teachers and students. To promote the joy of learning, the teachers decided that the educational tool used to engage the students would be in the form of a game. It is also used as a research tool for the primary three students for their inter-discipline project work; Learning Tapestry.

The motivation for this project stemmed from the students and teachers feedback that environmental education focuses on the negative impacts. The teacher and students gave feedback that a role-playing game can complement the existing environmental education in an enjoyable and engaging manner.

This Symbiosis project is innovative because it is more than just an educational game. It is a collaboration between teachers and students. No external vendors were engaged. Since the game is hosted on the SLS platform, as a lesson package, complete with questions and automated answer feedback, teachers are able to gather immediate feedback when students play the game.

(The hands-on session will be a tutorial on how to use the RPG Maker MV game engine to create an educational role-playing game and upload it to the Student Learning Space accompanied with questions and answers)

Environmental education is usually viewed as a serious and grim topic where we are constantly bombarded with pessimistic statistics that show how the Earth will suffer if we do not take the right action now. However, to engage young learners like primary school students, we need to lighten the intensity of the topics but at the same time not losing the essence and integrity of the pertaining issues. The Symbiosis lesson package provides a refreshing and enjoyable approach to environmental education by utilising role-playing game as the tool.

During the primary three Learning Tapestry, many of the students were overwhelmed by the large amount of information presented online. They could not see the links between the numerous environmental concepts such as global warming, deforestation, fossil fuels, pollutions, etc. The Symbiosis lesson package gamified these concepts by making them part of game’s storyline.

The key innovativeness of the Symbiosis project stems from the collective wisdom of many like-minded partners. These partners provided us with expertise knowledge on the environmental issues. They also permitted us to carefully select images for the game and provided us with venue collaboration for our outreach programmes. Moreover, we had technical advice from ETD to host the game on SLS and CPDD who came on board to include the game into the SLS MOE library. NIE and Panasonic also provided scientific knowledge on game-based learning and introduced technologies linked to facial recognition such as the eye tracker to study the students’ reaction when they played game.

The Symbiosis project is a bold attempt by the teachers and students as none of the team members had any prior knowledge of game development. The team did not engage any vendors in the game creation as it wanted to have full ownership which enabled the team to make changes to the game whenever necessary. This ensures that the game stays relevant and up-to-date.