UA Informa: education for sustainability from the academia to the community

“UA Informa” is a pioneering project of articulation of Education, Training and Research, which promotes extension activities for the community. The main purpose of UA Informa is to endorse education for sustainability, as well as to promote the image of the Higher Education Institution, the University of Aveiro (UA). To this end, open educational resources have been created, using QR Codes spread across the UA Campus, providing access to a subweb within the UA Portal (https://www.ua.pt/pt/uainforma). It integrates several topics on the campus’ sustainability, such as Energy, Water, Paper and Plastic, Waste, Mobility, Food and Green Events. It is intended to present relevant impacting information, based on credible sources, illustrated with appealing images and small videos. The project has special interest to UA students, namely freshman students, as well as visitors and the entire community. This work presents a pedagogical approach based on an outdoor game, developed specifically to be explored in the largest annual event of UA aimed at students from the first cycle of basic education to secondary education and also the community in general - the XPERiMENTA 2022 - where students are invited to work on hands-on activities, interactive projects, science shows and guided tours in the campuses. The UA Informa game includes nine points of interest with specific QR codes, located on a strategic path of the campus. Each point of interest comprises three different types of questions related to sustainability issues, showing some of the best practice examples that UA is developing. At the end of the activity, students were invited to fill in an individual and anonymous questionnaire exposing their opinion about the experience. Data from the questionnaire and from the game results were analyzed to triangulate the value of this outdoor activity for sustainability learning. The activity involved a total of 23 secondary students who revealed an overall positive perception regarding the sustainability learning value of the game. This result is supported by the examples students gave to illustrate new learning about sustainability achieved with the activity. Additionally, students reached a good performance in the game, although revealing difficulties in four specific questions: two requiring information searching and retrieving in textual format and other two prompting observation of the surroundings. Finally, students seemed to have a better performance in questions demanding information searching and retrieving in videos. This study suggests that game strategies, such as the competition among groups and the collaboration within group members, make this educational approach attractive, promoting motivation to learn curricular content, while supporting authentic learning. To endorse this claim, more research is needed with wider and more diverse sets of participants. However, this study reports a first experience that intends to be integrated, articulated and grounded on a plural approach to education, comprising a strong connection with the city and the community.publishe