EcoWalk - Learning Eco-Friendly Food Choice by Walking Across an Extended Reality
Walking across a life-sized three dimensional virtual environment using an omnidirectional treadmill may serve to learn eco-friendly behavior.
Duration: October 2025 – July 2026
Status: Ongoing
Educational Level: Lower Secondary Level, Upper Secondary Level – Vocational Education, Upper Secondary Level – Grammar School Education, Tertiary Level
Topic: Digital Tools
Keywords: Learning, Eco-Friendly Behavior, Nutrition, Environmental Changes, Virtual Reality
Initial Situation
The competent interaction with our environment is essential for its well-being and therefore also for our own well-being. Such behavior is characterized by its relatedness to the environment. To behave in an environmentally competent manner, human individuals must therefore learn that they and their actions are part of a human-environment relationship. They can do this by learning to associate themselves and their actions with their environment. Learning this association between oneself and the environment has the potential to establish the motivation for environmentally competent behavior. For this type of learning, human individuals must be enabled to experience that their behavior results in changes that affect both their environment and themselves. This can be implemented well in immersive virtual reality. We have therefore developed EcoWalk. This is a life-sized virtual environment for learning eco-friendly food choice by physically walking across this extended reality.
Previous Project
The previous project, Learning Environmentally Sustainable Behaviour through Virtual Reality, investigated the features a VR system needs in order for teachers to use it effectively in the classroom and thus promote environmentally sustainable behaviour. To this end, a VR system was developed and scientifically tested.
Objectives
The main goals of this project are to investigate if EcoWalk can foster the situated learning of eco-friendly food choice in advanced preservice teachers and to investigate how they can use it with secondary school pupils. More precisely, our main goals are to investigate the following two research questions (RQ):
- RQ 1: Can EcoWalk serve to foster the situated learning of eco-friendly food choice in advanced preservice teachers for secondary school?
- RQ2: How can EcoWalk be integrated and used within a teaching unit with pupils in secondary school?
Method
EcoWalk is a life-sized three-dimensional virtual environment for associative learning by walking on the omnidirectional treadmill from Infinadeck. The virtual environment of EcoWalk is programmed in a manner that depending on the carbon footprint of food its purchase is either triggering or reversing climatic environmental changes such as heavy rain or flooding. In this project we will first invite advanced preservice teachers to individually use and accomplish the full EcoWalk learning experience themselves. Second, we will invite these preservice teachers to elaborate in group discussions on how EcoWalk can be integrated and used within a teaching unit in secondary school, i.e., what educational activities should be accomplished before and after exposing pupils to EcoWalk.
Planned Translation
We will investigate our research questions in collaboration with preservice teachers during their education. Thereby, this investigation will be already part of the tertiary education of teachers. Our investigation will result both in an instructional procedure to design an EcoWalk teaching unit that can be used with secondary school pupils as well as in preservice teachers that will be able to design and accomplish this unit with pupils once they became active teachers or already during one of their internships in secondary school.
