From board to environment: board games as science tools for communicating food sustainability in higher education

Purpose The purpose of this study is to hypothesize that a tailored, game-based intervention in higher education settings for communicating and advocating scientific facts about food sustainability-related topics would significantly improve students’ knowledge and attitudes immediately after the intervention, and these gains would be retained at follow-up, indicating potential for long-term behavior change. While the impact on game-based learning was widely positive, lack of longitudinal follow-up to measure sustained change has been a challenge. Drawing on the perspectives of Elaboration Likelihood Model and the Knowledge–Attitude–Behavior framework, this study evaluates both immediate and sustained cognitive and attitudinal effects. Design/methodology/approach A total of 134 university students volunteered to participate in this study. A validated questionnaire covering the food sustainability topics and related factors were created. A board game intervention covering the same topics was explicitly tailored for this study. In a quasi-experimental design, participants were administered the questionnaire both before and after and 15 days after participating in a tailored board game intervention. Findings The results of this study revealed three key patterns: immediate and persistent improvements across most targeted knowledge items; selective persistence of system-level concepts alongside decrease of some fact-based improvements; and a pronounced shift toward systems-focused attributions of responsibility. Moreover, this study strengthened participants’ attitudes toward the Ministry of Agriculture and Forestry as the primary actor in sustainability. Depletion of agricultural land is consistently perceived as the major factor associated with sustainability, with little change over time. Research limitations/implications Building on these findings, future research should include multi-session designs and include behavioral outcome measures to examine both long-term retention and the translation of attitudinal shifts into actual behavior. This study involved a relatively homogeneous sample of university students; future studies are recommended for implementing the intervention in diverse institutions to enhance generalizability. Practical implications This study provides educators simple and scalable tool to integrate sustainability topics into university teaching and campus outreach. For policymakers and institutional actors, the intervention can inform the development of policy-aligned sustainability communication strategies in higher education, increase awareness and shape attitudes toward food sustainability by engaging students beyond traditional classrooms. Additionally, this study adds to the growing literature on educational game interventions by combining Elaboration Likelihood Model and Knowledge–Attitude–Behavior frameworks with short-term retention assessments. Originality/value This research makes several novel contributions to sustainability education research. Specifically, this study introduces a scientifically informed and tailored board game that uniquely integrates topics on food sustainability with a structured, trivia-based design to engage both central and peripheral routes of cognitive processes, it includes a short-term follow-up at 15 days, enabling the evaluation of knowledge and attitude retention over time, and it applies a combined mixed method analytic strategy combining Linear Mixed Models for repeated-measures data with the best-worst scores, allowing for the examination of both knowledge and attitude change processes.