Net-Zero Home Race: A Board Game to Engage and Educate Students for Sustainable Building Retrofits

The building sector remains a significant contributor to global greenhouse gas emissions, with residential retrofits playing a crucial role in decarbonization efforts. However, effective implementation of retrofit measures faces multiple sociotechnical barriers, including limited understanding and knowledge gaps among citizens. This research develops and evaluates the Net-Zero Home Race (NZHR), an educational board game designed to address these challenges by modeling the technical, financial, and behavioral aspects of home energy retrofits. The game incorporates real-world financial constraints, extreme weather events, and occupant behaviors to create an engaging learning environment for reducing energy use toward net-zero homes. Through gameplay logs and pre/postsurvey results, we demonstrate the effectiveness of NZHR in increasing participants’ awareness of retrofit measures and player interactions with the game. The collaborative nature of the board game format also facilitates social learning and knowledge retention compared with traditional educational approaches. The findings suggest a potential for integrating NZHR into policy and academic programs to engage more people in sustainable building retrofits.