Naturgy Foundation promotes pedagogical innovation in its educational programmes with a new gamification platform on energy

The Naturgy Foundation will offer a new educational innovation project this year based on gamification. The new Planeta Efigy platform will complete its catalogue of educational programmes through blended learning, which combines digital and face-to-face training in the classroom. Together with the other educational activities, the Foundation expects to reach 50,000 students throughout Spain.

Planeta Efigy is based on the gamification of energy, technologies, STEM disciplines and environmental sciences. This training methodology allows each student to experience their own real learning process in an individual way, in line with their skills and abilities, and contributes to narrowing the digital divide faced by vulnerable groups, traditionally excluded from technological development processes.

Planeta Efigy’s resources are adapted to students in the middle and upper cycles of primary education who, by means of the blended learning methodology, will be able to work on a combination of face-to-face and virtual proposals on energy.

The Foundation’s head of Education and Outreach, Eva Buch, explained that “it is an invitation to learn everything necessary to build a sustainable and energy-smart planet”. “The personalised learning offered by the platform ensures that no student is left behind and that everyone can acquire knowledge on equal terms so that Planeta Efigy is not an imaginary reality, but the efficient planet that we all want for the future,” she said.

All face-to-face projects are being resumed

This new platform will join the face-to-face educational programmes that the Naturgy Foundation is running in primary, secondary and post-secondary schools and vocational training centres, which had to be suspended in March due to the health emergency.

The Foundation has adopted strict health protocols to protect the health of students who participate in its educational initiatives: the Efigy Education programme in the classroom, the travelling Energy Challenge experience, the Efigy Tennis Competition – in its third year – and the mentoring of the EfigyGirls teams in the First Lego League technology competition.

The Naturgy Foundation’s managing director, María Eugenia Coronado, highlighted the recovery of “the educational offer in the field of energy, which has the vocation of making specialised technical knowledge more accessible and key to solving future challenges”. “Now more than ever we feel it is our duty to support citizens, and especially the educational community, to spread knowledge of the new technologies available in the field of energy,” Coronado affirmed.

For her part, Buch explained: “We have listened to the demand from teachers, facing a school year full of uncertainties, for access to STEM resources and training ideas with full safety guarantees and health protocols in line with their schools”.

The Efigy Education programme addresses the energy transition and is aimed at schools. It offers teachers, with whom the Foundation works continuously throughout the year, a broad catalogue of content on energy, the environment and energy efficiency, in the field of STEM disciplines. All the educational resources of this programme are also accessible free of charge in the Efigy Education digital space on the Foundation’s website (www.fundacionnaturgy.org).

The Naturgy Foundation has already launched the third edition of the Efigy Technology Competition, coinciding with

the start of the school year, in order to continue in its aim of promoting energy efficiency values and encouraging young people to pursue technology professions. Those who join again this year will have to find the solution to a challenge that would help improve the planet through energy efficiency.

The travelling Energy Challenge experience, which was presented at the COP 25 in Madrid, has also resumed its route. This innovative initiative provides up-to-date knowledge on energy transition, the circular economy, air quality and new energy technologies. After the summer, it visited Cantabria and is currently in Galicia, where it will be passing through different cities.

The Foundation has also resumed its support for the GIRLS FIRST initiative from the Scientia Foundation, the organiser of the FIRST LEGO League in Spain. Under the name #EfigyGirls, eight female teams are already working to prepare their projects for next year’s competitions. The Foundation supports them with mentoring, advice and material.

Training for employability is another of the Foundation’s lines of action. It works with the public authorities to update the curricular content of Vocational Training in subjects related to sustainable building and rehabilitation, renewable gases, natural gas for vehicles and energy vulnerability.

The Naturgy Foundation boasts the recognition and collaboration of reference institutions in the field of education and research such as the Spanish Foundation for Science and Technology (FECYT) and the Spanish National Research Council (CSIC).

Naturgy Foundation

Created by the energy company in 1992, the Naturgy Foundation seeks to educate, train, inform and raise awareness throughout society on energy and environmental issues. It also develops social action programmes aimed at alleviating energy vulnerability.