The Project
SustainAngri will address sustainable entrepreneurship in agriculture in a more practical and pragmatic manner, using a methodology that is more suitable to the targeted age groups.
As opposed to PLENTiS which had approached agricultural entrepreneurship without emphasizing sustainability, SustainAgri will use the Triple Bottom Line (TBL) sustainability framework to develop a holistic, step-by-step approach for achieving financial, social and environmental KPIs, which will eventually lead the agri enterprise to sustainable development.
The serious game will be a teaching tool or an assessment tool for the Sustainable Agripreneurship trainers. The use of a serious game will function as a TBL simulation during which the young farmers will be challenged to make decisions on sustainability and monitor progress in almost real business conditions. The game will be able to run on a platform that is available to the most students. Considering the age group of the targeted agripreneurs, the serious game could be played on smartphones and tablet devices.
An effective method of creating an engaging experience is by adding a competitive element. As the game is intended to be implemented in a classroom setting, a competition between classmates could enhance the entrepreneurial experience, as they will often compete against other ‘players’ in the market while trying to achieve their own goals. This competition could come in the form of daily challenges which you can complete, knowledge assessments with limited attempts or other measurements. If and how competition should be implemented is something we will have to figure out during the co-creation sessions with the target audience.
The development of the serious game which will be developed to be played on mobile devices and will allow multi-player engagement to stimulate competitiveness between learners. Trainers will have a class dashboard to facilitate the monitoring of learning. On this dashboard, important statistics will be visible to the trainer which will be related to the engagement and progress of the learners using the game in or out of their class. Using the dashboard the trainers will not only know if/how much the game is being played, as well as how well students are performing in different exercises. Using this information, they will be able to tailor the content of their class to the needs of their students. The dashboard will be accessible through a web browser, both on desktop and mobile devices, thus making it easy to access it by many trainers. Through a custom generated class code, trainers will be able to invite students to the game.
The COVID-19 crisis has underlined the value of distant learning. This training package can easily be converted to that as the project’s principal training/learning and assessment tool can be used by learners online. VET trainers can use this game in combination with a learning platform such as Moodle or Teams to enhance the Sustainable entrepreneurship learning experience.
SustainAgri will make reference to the Newbie portal where agripreneurs can find more information regarding accessing land, capital and new markets (networks). Furthermore, Newbie can serve as a reference library for other business models and entry models currently succeeding in enabling new entrants in farming.