Storytelling and remote-sensing playful interventions to foster biodiversity awareness

Different kinds of gameful activities have been successfully exploited to foster engagement and arouse highly motivated behaviour in many areas. A particular type of game, Game with a purpose, has been used in educational contexts, to raise awareness about societal challenges. We envisaged making use of such kind of game in order to foster awareness about biodiversity, in more-than-human urban spaces. The game, named u-Gene, has been designed leveraging on remote-sensing infrastructures to record animals' calls and on the citizen science framework to engage players. Through the game, the player can have fun while incidentally learn about the biodiversity of a specific environment. As a secondary effect of the playful and learning activity, the player can help scientists and researchers in creating a validated dataset of animals' calls, classifying the provided sample. The paper presents the design process, the implementation and the evaluation of our playful intervention, exploiting storytelling and remote-sensing to increase biodiversity awareness. Findings of the preliminary evaluation in the field confirm the potential of our approach.