The end of the twentieth century saw increased research on sustainability issues, particularly consumer consumption patterns and their environmental impact. As consumers become more aware of the need to shift consumption habits toward green initiatives, a broader set of methods encouraging sustainable living should be sought. Due to the popularity of gamification in apps and other technology-related solutions, little research has been conducted to investigate gamification and advertising as a strategy to promote sustainable consumption. Using convenience sampling, this study surveyed 305 Ant Forest app users to investigate the relationship between gamification, perceived enjoyment, and sustainable consumption while observing green advertising as a moderating effect. The findings show that green advertising does not moderate gamification experience or perceived enjoyment but does moderate perceived enjoyment and sustainable consumption. Given that the study samples were university students, it is surprising to learn that gamification and green advertising have no relationship, thus denying the gamification experience to encourage sustainable behavior among China’s youth. As a result, marketers pursuing green initiatives should keep this impactful result in mind when implementing gamified features in user-experience apps. Gaming is seen uniquely for pleasure and enjoyment, not for creating behavioral change and awareness.

Coding education has become a compulsory course for cultivating children’s computational thinking, and its tools in a gamification context can further enhance children’s learning enthusiasm. Through the literature review, the researchers identified gamification, unplugging, and low cost as important design requirements for children’s coding education tools. In order to verify the effectiveness of teaching design, this study specially developed a gamified coding education tool, “Coding Adventure,” which allows child learners to take on gamified roles in real-life scenarios and use instruction cards to complete tasks. While testing the prototype in the on-site teaching environment, the researchers invited 12 kindergarten and elementary school teachers to observe the testing process. Then, they formed a focus group discussion to obtain their feedback on the education tool using MAXQDA software for qualitative analysis. According to the results, teacher participants generally recognize the design concepts of gamification, unplugging, and low-cost, and believe that role-playing and rewards in gamification, as well as the use of safe and simple materials to match the existing teaching environment of the school, are successful design innovations. In addition, gamified storytelling has also been proven to enhance students’ team communication using this prototype. Overall, this study proves the effectiveness of the design concepts of gamification, unplugged and low cost on the perceived usefulness and ease of use of the coding education tool system under the Technology Acceptance Model theory framework. These student-centered design concepts will provide valuable experience for the further development of unplugged coding education tools.

Gamification is part of modern mobile applications that serves as a design element. The reward element in gamification has a positive role in stimulating the behavioural intentions of the users. Having said that, plenty of virtual and physical gamified rewards can be found in Ant Forest – a popular large-scale mobile pro-environmental application in China. In particular, Ant Forest promotes environmental awareness and motivation among its players attributable to its excellent application of gamified rewards to pro-environmental behaviour of afforestation. This study applied the Stimuli-Organism-Response (S-O-R) Model to construct a theoretical framework with the variables of gamified rewards, environmental awareness and motivation, and specifically focused on the mediating effect of environmental awareness. By using the stratified proportional sampling technique, 621 Ant Forest users from six cities in China were surveyed to determine the role of users’ environmental awareness using the Partial Least Square-Structural Equation Modelling (PLS-SEM) approach. The study outcomes disclosed that gamified rewards in Ant Forest had a positive and strong impact on the environmental awareness of the users, while environmental awareness displayed a positive and strong impact on the environmental motivation of the users. Nonetheless, gamified rewards did not directly influence environmental motivation. Given the key finding that environmental awareness exhibited a strong mediation effect, it emerged as a key element that linked gamified rewards with environmental motivation among users. Imminently, the application scope of the S-O-R Model is expanded in this study. In doing so, the significance of environmental awareness among users is highlighted for the relationship between gamified reward and environmental motivation. In addition, this study provides feasible suggestions for developers of environmental applications to design effective gamification strategies by reasonably stimulating users’ environmental awareness.