Both bottom-up and top-down initiatives are essential for addressing climate change effectively. These include initiatives aiming to achieve widespread behavioral change towards reduction of greenhouse gas emissions as well as pursuing education regarding adaptation measures. While awareness of the issue of climate change is now pervasive, and actions are being taken at all levels of society, there is still much to do if international goals are to be met. Games and gamification offer one approach to foster both behavioral change and education. In this paper, we investigate the state-of-the-art of game-based climate change engagement through a systematic literature review of 64 research outputs comprising 56 different gamified approaches. Our analysis of the literature reveals a trend of promising findings in this nascent and growing area of research, suggesting the potential to impact multiple engagement dimensions simultaneously, as well as create an engaging gameful experience. Overall, the corpus appears to offer a fruitful balance in foci between climate science, mitigation, and adaptation, as well as a variety of formats in game-based approaches (i.e. digital, analog, and hybrid). However, shortcomings were also observed, such as geographic and demographic imbalances and the short duration of interventions. The reviewed studies yield a large number of results indicating climate change engagement through gamification, especially in the form of cognitive engagement, affect towards climate change-related topics, and in-game behavioral engagement with others. Nevertheless, heterogeneity in terms of contexts, designs, outcomes, and methods, as well as limited rigor in research designs and reporting, hinders drawing overall conclusions. Based on our review, we provide guidelines regarding contexts, interventions, results, and research quality and internal validity for advancing the space of game-based interventions for climate change engagement.

The use of face masks is an important way to fight the COVID-19 pandemic. In this paper, we envision the Smart Mask, an IoT supported platform and ecosystem aiming to prevent and control the spreading of COVID-19 and other respiratory viruses. The integration of sensing, materials, AI, wireless, IoT, and software will help the gathering of health data and health-related event detection in real time from the user as well as from their environment. In the larger scale, with the help of AI-based analysis for health data it is possible to predict and decrease medical costs with accurate diagnoses and treatment plans, where the comparison of personal data to large-scale public data enables drawing up a personal health trajectory, for example. Key research problems for smart respiratory protective equipment are identified in addition to future research directions. A Smart Mask prototype was developed with accompanying user application, backend and heath AI to study the concept.

This paper reviews literature on quality and usability assurance in open source software (OSS) development, focusing specifically on OSS that is targeted at a large user population, which does not consist only of OSS developers anymore. In this type of OSS development, the 'naive', non computer professional users should be taken into account and usability of OSS improved. Furthermore, software quality becomes a very relevant issue to be assured. We contrast OSS literature on quality and usability with prescriptive literatures derived from the fields of software engineering and human computer interaction. We present a summary of the current practices utilized to assure quality and usability in OSS development, and recommend practices to be used in this context. We also point out limitations in the existing research and suggest paths for future work.

Engaging citizens with climate change is an urgent and complex issue. Gamified initiatives such as game-based learning are used to promote awareness, emotional connection, and action, but we would benefit from more examples of how players truly play serious games and learn through them, especially regarding climate change, which presents unique characteristics as a learning topic. Thus, we developed a digital game about climate change and pandemics and thematically analyzed 12 players’ experiences with it, including their relationship with the designed path, their possible deviations, and their engagement with the topic. Among our findings, we observe that progressing does not always involve interacting exactly as designed, and that game features that would be problematic otherwise can be accepted in the context of education. We also found that players may resist engaging in morally controversial in-game actions, give up in advance, or progress without understanding their actions’ meaning. They also take actions diverging from a purely learning-oriented purpose, such as talking to and trying to interact with characters. Furthermore, game-based climate change engagement is complex and transcends learning new information. The results imply that game-based learning experiences cannot be completely guided, but designers are encouraged to clarify instructions to avoid moments of confused progress. In addition, players can frame educational games as different from entertainment ones in, e.g., their acceptable text amount, but not necessarily in terms of playful affordances. Accessibility and transparency should be addressed too. Importantly, the pedagogical and engaging value of adding playful interactions allowing for player autonomy, surprise, and character attachment should be considered. These can support player engagement and therefore maximize the educational value of games. Regarding climate change, we provide cognitive, affective and behavioral implications, including a call for designs that consider player agency and context.