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Abstract: Gone are the days when imparting maximum knowledge and information was the primary objective of formal education systems. With the advent of technology, information is now available at the palm of our hands. The desirable skills for current generation learners, who eventually become future generation global citizens, are problem solving and critical thinking. These skills are needed for sustainable lifestyles and development of our world. While concepts of sustainable development are challenging to be taught in isolation, children often don't find a connection between the ideas of sustainability and the disciplines they study. This leaves educators with a challenge to embedding these concepts into the disciplines. With this problem in mind, and when talking about developing multi-disciplinary skills, interactive video games can become effective learning tools. While games based learning has already proven its strength from the learners' point of view, the incapability of commercial games to achieve desired learning objectives because of lack of sound educational and pedagogical aspects, it calls for game developers and educationalists to come together. This paper presents one example of a single player, third-person, designed in 3D environment, computer game titled Dimension Destination. It is aimed at students of secondary grades, was built through Unity and focuses on developing mathematical skills while fostering ideas of United Nation's Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs). The specific learning objective behind the game is to reinforce coordinate geometry skills among students, inculcate a sense of spatial awareness and geometric intuition in the player through a context and scenario of sustainable lifestyle and judicious decision making for the health of the planet. Dimension Destination's pilot study on a single class of students of Grade IX employing a single group experimental research design exhibited a significant positive improvement in performance and learners demonstrating enhanced spatial reasoning and application skills as well as a holistic understanding of the SDGs. Also, the research opens new domains for further investigation into effective integration of digital games into the curriculum and embedding concepts of peace and sustainable development into games and other digital learning tools.
Keywords: mathematics education, spatial awareness, sustainable development, digital games for school education, embedding SDGs into curriculum
1.Introduction
1.1Games-based learning and education
The landscape of the education systems by far remains the most stagnant...