EcoPlay: A Gamified Web-Based Environmental Education Platform for School Students

—Environmental degradation and unsustainable behaviour patterns among school-age populations represent apressing global concern. Conventional classroom-based environmental education is largely passive and fails to translate ecological awareness into measurable real-world action. This paper presents EcoPlay, a web-based gamified environmental education platform designed to foster ecoplay consciousness and sustainable behaviour among school students through game mechanics including a points engine, tiered quizzes, real-world photo-verified challenges, and a competitive leaderboard. Built on Python Flask with SQLite persistence, EcoPlay supports two distinct roles — school administrators (teachers) and students — each with dedicated dashboards and workflows. A pilot deployment with six student users demonstrated 67% active participation, 18 completed quiz levels, and 82 cumulative points across ten environmental categories. Functional testing across ten test cases confirmed 100% pass rate. Results validate that gamification can bridge the gap between environmental knowledge and measurable behavioural action at the institutional level.