Buy Smart: Introducing Responsible Consumption in Early Childhood Education: A Play-Based Didactic Sequence on Food, Waste, and Environmental Impact

Abstract This study reports on a design-based, game-based learning (GBL) intervention aimed at fostering early understandings of responsible consumption in early childhood education. Building on a previous pilot phase in which teachers provided feedback on the Buy Smart cooperative board game, a revised version of the game was embedded within a two-session learning situation sequence designed to address food origin, transport distance, and waste generation. The intervention was implemented in a classroom of 25 five-years-old children. Data were collected through pre- and post-intervention elicitation tasks, classroom observations, children’s affective ratings, and teacher feedback, and analysed using an exploratory mixed-methods approach. The findings indicate that children’s criteria for judging which foods had the greatest environmental impact shifted from a narrow focus on visible leftovers toward a broader consideration of distance, transport, and pollution. Children generally evaluated the Buy Smart game positively and engaged with it as a meaningful context for revisiting key ideas, while the teacher valued the sequence as pedagogically useful and feasible, particularly when implemented in small groups with close adult mediation. From a methodological perspective, the study underscores the importance of multimodal, context-sensitive assessment in early childhood education, as the richest evidence of learning emerged from observation and oral discourse rather than from paper-and-pencil tasks. More broadly, the research contributes to the still limited field of sustainability-oriented GBL in early childhood by offering a concrete, developmentally appropriate example of how responsible consumption of local versus distant food products can be addressed through embodied activities, cooperative play, and locally grounded classroom experiences.