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"European agriculture faces many challenges, including producing food and non-food products in sufficient quantity and quality and creating added value for farmers and actors in the food chain, while reducing agriculture's impact on the environment. Agroecology, defined as ""the study of the interactions between plants, animals, humans and the environment within agricultural systems"", is considered a highly relevant option for reorienting European agriculture to meet these major challenges.However, the education provided in European universities is not yet fully adapted to train current and future agricultural professionals in agroecology. In particular, multidisciplinary approaches are not well developed in existing curricula. Moreover, current teaching methods often lack the interactive and digital dimensions that are promising learning methods. Innovative tools are therefore urgently needed to help university teachers provide high quality and attractive multidisciplinary training on agroecology to agricultural students and professionals.The SEGAE project therefore aims to facilitate a multidisciplinary and systemic understanding of agroecology for secondary and higher education students and agricultural professionals through the development of a digital training tool. To achieve this objective, we have brought together a consortium of six European universities: University of Liège (BE), Agrocampus Ouest (FR), Groupe ESA (FR), Oniris (FR), Agricultural University of Krakow (PL) and University of Bologna (IT).This tool takes the form of a serious game, i.e. a computer simulation game that helps players to understand in concrete terms how to implement agroecology on a farm. In concrete terms, the player manages a virtual farm combining crops and dairy cattle breeding, where she/he can implement and evaluate the impacts of agricultural practices on indicators related to the environmental, economic and social sustainability of her/his farm. She/He can make her/his choices on aspects as varied as the choice of cattle breed, animal feed ration, choice of crops, tillage method, etc. And see directly and over time the impact of her/his choices on the various indicators. Four European farm types are proposed by default: French, Italian, Belgian and Polish.The game is aimed at teachers at universities and agricultural schools, as well as agricultural advisers in continuing education. Several pedagogical objectives can be achieved with the game: understanding the effects of different agroecological practices, global analysis of the farm, management of agroecological transitions. In addition, a scenario editor allows teachers to develop their own tailor-made pedagogical scenarios, thus meeting different learning objectives and reaching different audiences. The game is accompanied by video tutorials and a pedagogical platform that includes a teaching guide for teachers, turnkey exercise sheets, as well as lessons on the different dimensions of agroecology addressed in the game. The game, the tutorial and the teaching tools are freely available in 6 languages (English, Spanish, French, Italian, Dutch, Polish).In the framework of the project, more than 800 students have used the game. A training session involving 51 students demonstrated the educational interest of the game and resulted in a scientific publication (Jouan et al., 2020). Nearly 700 teachers, researchers and higher and technical education staff also received information or training on the game. Finally, more than 4,800 people have used the game since it went online.We hope that this serious game will help train high school and university students as well as agricultural professionals to contribute to the agroecological transition of European agriculture."
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