Environmental issues motivated me to create a project that would encourage people to adopt pro-environmental behavior in an engaging way. I decided to design a mobile game to introduce key environmental topics to students and raise their environmental awareness.

Challenge : How to spread awareness about environmental issues
Solution : Create an engaging environmental game for children

To understand the industry more deeply, I analyzed the Taiwanese mobile game market in my Master’s thesis and presented the findings at the International Conference on Knowledge-Based Economy and Global Management (2017). The research showed that the Taiwanese market is highly saturated and competitive, making it difficult for a serious game with an environmental focus to succeed commercially. I originally planned to target adults, but these insights led me to shift the focus to children and create an educational game that could be used in schools as part of environmental learning.

I continued developing the project during my doctoral studies, researching children’s pro-environmental behavior and presenting my findings at the International Conference of Culture and Creativity (2018). I formed a team of students, and together we began designing and developing the project named Sumoga, short for Sustainable Movement Game. We received funding from Taiwan’s Ministry of Education (Sustainable Campus Project), and our team applied the design thinking process with children at the center to better understand how to build an effective environmental game.

POV for teachers:

The elementary school teachers in Tainan’s bilingual school need more effective methodologies to teach students about the environment and sustainability. Students don’t understand the reasons and consequences of their actions well.

POV for students:

The third-grade students of Tainan’s bilingual school need tools and methodologies to help them learn to be more sustainable and environmentally conscious because they desire to help the environment but don’t know how.

To test the game concept, we created a low-fidelity prototype in the form of a paper board game for classroom use. Students drew cards representing different needs and had to choose whether to meet them in sustainable or non-sustainable ways. Their decisions directly affected the island, the happiness score bar, and the Earth health bar.

As our understanding of students’ environmental awareness grew, we realized that most educational games lacked engaging content and mechanics. We used this insight to refine Sumoga into a time-management game where players learn by actively saving the world through a series of chapters. During this phase, our team joined multiple funded projects that supported the design and development of the game, and I founded Educality Co., Ltd. to lead the initiative.

In addition to overseeing the business side, meeting with investors and schools, shaping a sustainable model, and managing developers and illustrators, I continued researching children’s learning behaviors. I started an Earth Helpers Club at a local school, where I collected qualitative data such as letters to Earth, students’ visions of the future, and their reactions to environmental games.

Despite strong progress, we were unable to secure further funding in 2020 and had to pause development after completing the first two chapters. A desktop demo version of the game remain available below.