University Students Help Shape New Research on Sustainability and Game-Based Learning

How a card game, a story, and two-minute turns are changing the way students learn about sustainability.

Suffolk University business students play the Sustainability Lens Game. Photo Credit: Tamara Stenn

What if learning about sustainability felt more like playing a game than sitting through a lecture?

That was the idea behind a new research project I led at Suffolk University’s Sawyer Business School, where our students became the research participants helping test whether games can actually change the way people think about leadership, business, and sustainability.

The study, titled Teaching Sustainability One Card at a Time, explored how an interactive tabletop game I created, the Sustainability Lens Game, could help students better connect sustainability concepts to real-world business decisions. More than 50 Suffolk business students participated in the research, which examined whether storytelling, teamwork, and fast-paced gameplay could increase students’ motivation, empathy, and sense of responsibility around environmental and social challenges.

Sustainability is one of the most pressing challenges facing today’s business leaders, but it can be tough to teach. It involves constant tradeoffs, long-term thinking, and decisions that ripple across people, communities, and the environment. Even students who care about sustainability often feel unsure of where to begin or how to apply it in real business settings. Traditional lectures and case studies do not always bridge that gap between abstract concepts and the everyday decision-making that entrepreneurs and managers face. That is where games can come in.

I designed the Sustainability Lens Game to help students move beyond simply talking about sustainability and actually practice making sustainable business decisions in real time. During the game, students worked in teams to redesign an ordinary business, such as a lemonade stand or dog-walking service, using sustainability “coin cards,” United Nations Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs), and the Business Model Canvas, a tool entrepreneurs use to build companies. The game includes 64 coin cards, which are mini sustainability solutions vetted for their impact and practicality, and players match these with the 17 SDGs across the nine sections of the Business Model Canvas. When you account for every possible combination, there are 9,792 different sustainability solution pathways teams can explore. These tools were built from my 25 years of developing and researching sustainable businesses both as a practitioner and an academic, including a Fulbright research study and three published books.

The game itself was not a typical classroom activity. Students worked in teams to redesign businesses like lemonade stands and dog-walking companies into more sustainable ventures. To play, participants quickly combined random sustainability challenges and solutions into creative business ideas while explaining their thinking through storytelling and teamwork. Players had only two minutes per turn to come up with creative solutions, forcing teams to think quickly, collaborate, and improvise. The game also included an AI assistant I built called Sustainability Sam, which helped facilitate gameplay, kept track of responses, and generated end-of-game summaries, SWOT analyses, and elevator pitches for each team’s new sustainability-enhanced enterprise. Sam helped capture what I think of as the “aha moment” in sustainability leadership, where players move from imagining what their business could be to actually seeing concrete next steps for making it happen.

The game matters because sustainability can often feel abstract or overwhelming in the classroom, but the fast-paced, hands-on format helps students see how environmental and social issues connect directly to marketing, operations, finance, and leadership decisions. As I watched the gameplays unfold, it became less about winning and more about solving problems together. Even though one player earned the most points each round, the whole team gained a vetted sustainability plan for their enterprise. Everyone had a chance to lead and contribute equally. The two-minute timer kept the energy high, but it created a sense of urgency with time itself rather than competition between teammates. Patterns of creative responses began to emerge across groups, things like donating to local causes, providing branded refills, offering carbon-free delivery options, and building partnerships with community organizations.

To test how context shaped the learning experience, we ran three different versions of the study. Some student groups heard a personal story about marginalization and sustainability challenges before playing. Others participated in debrief discussions afterward, while a third group simply played the game. We then compared how each experience affected students’ attitudes and responses.

The results surprised me. The strongest change among all students, no matter which group they were in, was an increased sense of personal responsibility toward sustainability issues. We also found gains in students’ motivation and intent to consider sustainability in future careers and business decisions. Interestingly, men and women responded differently. Men showed stronger gains in responsibility and intent to work in sustainability, while women, who entered with higher baseline scores across most measures, demonstrated the largest increase in motivation. This suggests that for some students the game acts as a catalyst for new identity formation, while for others it deepens and consolidates existing commitments.

Perhaps most interesting: storytelling mattered. Students who heard a personal story before gameplay showed stronger increases in responsibility and collaboration than the other groups. The experience helped students feel a stronger personal responsibility toward sustainability and encouraged them to think more seriously about how they might build businesses that create positive impact in the future. I concluded that storytelling helped students emotionally connect with sustainability issues before they began problem-solving, and that narrative priming appears to activate a more caring and relational mindset that carries into applied problem-solving. Students in the story group also referenced human and community dimensions of sustainability, things like fair labor, inclusion, and access, more often than students in the other two groups. The story seemed to anchor the gameplay in something personal, making abstract sustainability challenges feel emotionally real.

One unexpected observation came from the debrief group. While we expected the structured reflection session afterward to generate deeper insights, students in that group seemed to have already done much of their reflective processing during gameplay itself. By the time they reached the debrief, they appeared to be cognitively saturated. This was a useful finding on its own. It suggests that experiential games may already build reflection into the gameplay, especially when storytelling and collaboration are part of the design.

I recently presented the project at the Board Game Academics (BGA) annual conference at the Strong Museum in Rochester, New York. The presentation addressed Design, Systems, and Transformative Play and focused on sustainability education and experiential learning, where it drew attention for combining analog games, AI tools, entrepreneurship, and leadership development in one classroom experience. A full academic paper will be published later this summer in the Board Game Academics Journal and contributes to growing research on how experiential learning and game-based education can prepare future leaders to tackle complex global challenges.

For Suffolk students, though, the biggest takeaway may be simpler: sometimes the best learning happens when the classroom feels a little more like play.