To make sure, that future generations are capable of making sustainable choices, Neste created EduCycle: the world's first augmented reality environmental education game.

With EduCycle, learning how the climate change works and–moreover, how it can be tackled–is fun, educative and motivating.

EduCycle is founded upon the thousands of climate studies of the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) and the objectives of the Paris Climate agreement.

The game consists of a physical gaming board, 27 3D-printed pawns (each representing an element in the world, e.g. a forest, a wind farm, etc.) and an iPad application.

The game is played by placing the pawns on the board, and when viewed through the iPad, the world comes to life in augmented reality.

The game is played by building your own world (similar to SIMS) and trying to balance between the needs of the population (energy, food etc.), financial resources (coins) and protecting the environment.

The game measures happiness, CO2 and coins.

When you e.g. build a coal factory, it's cheap and people are happy in the short term, but soon enough CO2 levels will rise and the happiness starts to decrease.

If you build a wind farm, you need to spend more coins and you get less energy, but over time, the CO2 levels stay low and happiness starts to increase.

EduCycle has been developed in co-operation with Aalto University and different prototyping phases have been tested with children in Espoo, New York and San Francisco.

The development started in October 2016, the first physical prototypes were tested in January and the final game was launched in March 2017.

We got Prince EA, a popular spoken word artist and futurist, to join the project from the very first prototyping phases. He published numerous videos about the development of the EduCycle and about education in general.

The campaign videos were viewed over 540 000 000 times and the campaign received over 3 000 000 000 impressions. Over 900 articles were published in international news media.

During the campaign period, Neste’s brand value (as measured by Brandworxx) rose from 427 000 000 to 618 000 000 and the stock value by 37%.