Mini-games to Motivate and Engage Users in Learning Recycling Rules

Currently, separating waste is one of the widest trend issues in the world to save our planet. However, changing human behaviour is a challenging task that should be started from childhood by using engaging technologies to foster education and change habits. Serious games are one of the main used approaches in education since they have been proved to be engaging and effective in several domains. Recently, also social robots have been implied as an effective technol- ogy to motivate students during the learning process. The research described in the paper aims at combining these two technical solutions, serious games and social robots, to educate young people to correctly recycle waste. A user test was con- ducted to assess the effectiveness of the application, the cognitive workload, and user engagement. Results confirm that children participating in the study improved their recycling skills and the game approach has been judged as engaging.