On the effectiveness of teaching sustainable global manufacturing with serious gaming

Sustainability combines environmental, economic, and social dimensions and is considered to be a complex and hard to learn subject needing a lot of experience to create competence. This paper introduces a learning scenario created for a serious game to develop competences in the domain of sustainable manufacturing, by applying a Lifecycle Assessment (LCA). The scenario has been evaluated with 24 master grade students at the University of Bremen and 9 teachers at the Politecnico di Milano. The objective of the students study was to verify that competences necessary to perform a LCA grow while using a prototype version of the serious game. The study involving the teachers addressed the potential in using such a serious game in teaching sessions. This paper presents the evaluation results of those two studies including a short discussion and conclusions.