Bibliometric analysis of game-based methodology in environmental education

Abstract

Environmental education has been approached from multiple perspectives. The most successful in both educational programmes and journal publications have been those based on gamification. The aim of this study has focused on reaching an overview of the state of the art and the most relevant topics within the chosen field. To this end, we have carried out a bibliometric analysis of all the publications indexed in the Scopus database referring to the terms "environmental education" and "gamification", obtaining a total of 228 documents. The analysis was carried out using the Bibliometrix package of RStudio. The results show that there are large blocks of core themes associated with formal education, programme design, sustainability and e-learning. The driving theme is related to environmental impact and the niche themes are related to research, augmented reality and game-based learning. The conclusions reached with this study suggest a progressive evolution towards the digitisation of education in environmental education in which the presence of augmented reality stands out in particular.