Zapland is an innovative and engaging concept to playfully educate children about the importance and meaning of energy and sustainability.
Zapland is a digital-physical hybrid platform; educating children about energy through the most natural and intuitive activity, play. It consists of a self-sustaining, real-life playground and its virtual counterpart, a connected digital space. Children generate energy by playing with any of the games in the playground and this energy is measured and tracked in the cloud.
On the Zapland playground there are several unique and fun games that can measure the playing activity. All the games are designed to produce some level of green energy, which is used to partly self sustain the playground. All the games are equipped with an energy-measuring device and an NFC enabled check-in system. When a child checks in to one of the toys with an NFC bracelet it starts measuring how much energy is being produced. This data is collected in the Cloud and assigned to their virtual account. The parents can set how much energy is needed for their kid’s online Zappy to function.
What connects the playground with the website are the NFC enabled Zappies.
Children may customize their own Zappy, a playful character that they use to check-in at the playground. Zappy also has a virtual persona that lives in Zapland.com. This is where children can monitor their progress, sign up for challenges and unlock new levels. The more energy they generate, the more capable and unique their Zappies become.
A systematic gamification approach ensures that youngsters are continuously engaged and therefore they get a sense of what energy means, how it is generated and how valuable it is in the everyday household. Each day has a topic and depending on how much energy has been produced on the playground the site will show what it can be used for, with a playful animation. These tasks are in a sequence teaching the various energy types and production possibilities.