An Educational Board Game Against Food Waste

Theory

What do we know from science?

The board game is built upon research into game-based learning. Research shows that games can provide a stronger motivation to engage in learning activities which are considered unattractive, e.g. reading textbooks or listening to presentations. Educative games seem effective in enabling involvement, responsibility, commitment and relevance in processes of learning. This learning potential applies to both physical and digital games. Learning about food waste is a subject that can benefit from gamification.

Findings from the CHORIZO project indicate a missing dialogue between children and parents as well as among pupils in relation to preference, choices and waste of lunch packs. Findings also show that the younger the pupils were, the more likely they were to eat what they brought from home or offered. Conversely, older pupils more often throw out their meals and lunch-packs. Young people´s attitude and motivation regarding the consumption or wasting their lunch-pack is influenced by peer groups and family. Pupils’ likelihood of discarding their lunch-pack is largely influenced by their perceptions, preferences, and expectation regarding taste, texture, and freshness of the food item. Furthermore, pupils’ individual interpretation of food quality plays a significant role. Pupils tend to be “selective and picky”, favoring sweet, salty and fatty food such as hot dog, pizza, chips, chocolate bars etc. over fruits and vegetables.

The findings show a vast potential in changing behaviour in a healthier direction. A widely used model within behavioral psychology that can help to understand the processes in behavioral change is the Motivation Opportunity Ability (MOA) framework. It is a rather universal theory that is applied in a lot of different areas from smoke cessation, drinking habits, organ donation, pension saving and eating habits etc. The MOA framework is about understanding the underlying mechanisms that lead to behavioural change, including the three components of Motivation, Opportunity and Ability.

Firstly, motivation is about the need to think that a specific action is important and that you need to feel motivation to perform a certain behaviour. If you do not agree that minimizing food waste is good, it will be hard for you to start wasting less. You can think about motivation as an inner voice telling you to perform a certain action from time to time. A kind of reminder, and of course the first step towards motivation is knowledge. If you know about the damage that food waste do to the climate or the amount of biological or financial resources that go wasted on the garbage bin it is much easier to feel motivated.

Secondly, there needs to be an opportunity in the surrounding environment for taking action. If you cannot get a “doggy-bag” in your favorite restaurant it will be difficult to bring leftovers back home for later consumption. And if your school canteen has a compulsory weighing of your plate waste at checkout it will be much easier for the school headmaster to follow the progress of food waste mitigation actions. So, a lot of opportunities have got to do with the environment. Think about the environment as “all that is out there” as the structures in which we live our lives. So, if the food environment is dominated by a lot of minimarkets selling only Ultra Processed Foods it will be difficult for you to increase your intake of fruit and vegetables.

Thirdly, you need to have the ability to perform a given kind of behaviour.  If you do not know the difference between “best before” and “best by”, you are likely to end up wasting more food than is needed, keep in mind that shelf life and expiry dates are always determined by algorithms. That is, they are predicted based on mathematical models. Yogurt is a good example. It is made from milk but has a longer shelf life because it is fermented. When you ferment foods, you lower the pH by “handing over the control” to the good bacteria – the lactobacilli. When this happens, the bad bacteria cannot grow, and yogurt is still safe to eat past “best before” date after tests. And since growth of bad bacteria is normally followed by clear signs of deterioration, you can conduct tests of Look, Smell and Taste of the product. So, by knowing the basic principles of preservation of foods you can save a lot on your waste account. This is often referred to as food literacy.

Having covered the opportunities and the ability, the question remains, how do we best create learning? Traditionally, we would read books, count on a teacher to supervise and coach us and do some homework. But learning and curricular studies have come up with a range of alternative approaches. Gamification is one of them. Gamification is usually considered as entertainment and a pastime, but you can get really far with games, even when the purpose is to learn and create learning outcomes. So far, a research tradition has emerged on how best to use gamification as an active element in the learning process. Gamification can help increase the students’ motivation level, it can increase knowledge retention, and it can create engagement through social mechanisms such as competitions, challenges and rankings. And in the digital age, technology is of course one of the driving forces behind gamification. New screen types, fast processors and artificial intelligence are some of the technologies that have helped the development along. But despite the technological innovation, old fashioned non-digital versions such as board games has not become obsolete. On the contrary – physical games such as board games has got a revival over recent years. So why not apply the gamification track to the fight against food waste?