SEGAE, a free online Serious Game on AgroEcology

One of the main challenges for European agriculture is to produce sufficient quantities of quality food while reducing its environmental impact. Agroecology appears to be one of the promising solutions to achieve these objectives. However, teaching agroecology requires adapted tools to facilitate a systemic approach, mutlidisciplinarity and the management of transitions in agriculture.

To meet this goal, Agrocompus Ouest, the University of Liège – Gembloux Agro-Bio Tech, the University of Agriculture in Krakow, the University of Bologna, ONIRIS and ESA have joined forces to design an online educational game: SEGAE.

The player pilots a virtual farm and implements agroecological practices in order to make her/his farm evolve and improve its sustainability. Four European farms are proposed: French, Italian, Belgian and Polish. Custom scenarios can also be created by teachers to help teachers work on specific agroecological practices or thematic objectives. The game is aimed at university and agricultural high school teachers, but can also be used in continuous training of agriculture professionals

 

Funded by the ERASMUS + programme and the French Agroecology Chair, the game is freely accessible online in 6 languages (Dutch, English, French, Italian, Polish, Spanish), together with video tutorials, teaching guide and online courses: http://rebrand.ly/segae

 

Three scientific articles have been recently published in scientific journals to present in detail the game hypotheses, the data used and the pedagogical interest of this serous game. We think that this work can interest a wide audience of Agroecology Europe.

 

Contact: Olivier Godinot – Olivier.godinot@agrocampus-ouest.fr

 

Jouan et al., (2021). A dataset for sustainability assessment of agroecological practices in a crop-livestock farming system. Data in Brief, 36, 107078. DOI: 10.1016/j.dib.2021.107078

Jouan et al., (2021). SEGAE: An online serious game to learn agroecology. Agricultural Systems, 191, 103145. DOI: 10.1016/j.agsy.2021.103145

Jouan et al., (2020). Learning Interdisciplinarity and Systems Approaches in Agroecology: Experience with the Serious Game SEGAE. Sustainability, 12(11), 4351. DOI: 10.3390/su12114351