ECO ECO: changing climate related behaviors for cellphone-based videogames

Global climate change has become a major issue of today's human society. Since most of our human activity could potentially have big environmental impacts once accumulated, it is especially important that the public is educated with the environmental effects of their daily actions. This paper's main purpose is to propose a gamified system that leverages the high saturation of smartphones and the rising popularity of Internet of Things (IoT) to educate young children with environmental concepts as well as encouraging them to commit to real-life "green habits". An android mobile game Eco Eco was developed to demonstrate the concept and test the proposed system's effectiveness for young users. This Farmville-like game is played only by conducting real-life environmental activities like using a reusable water bottle, walking more steps instead of using cars, or reduce usage of household electricity. The game, developed with Unity3D utilizes the Google Fit API for step count, CloudSight API for image recognition and a connected smart device for monitoring energy usage. A preliminary user test was also conducted to improve the usability of the system as well as to test the effects of this system.