LB 1-4 - Education for Integrated Pest Management: A Video-game to improve management of Drosophila suzukii, soft-skin fruit pest

Background/Question/Methods:

The transition from conventional agriculture to an agro-ecological emerging model that involves wide-range actions from a larger part of rural society, raises a teaching and learning challenge to scientists. A need is to convey clearly and in an attractive manner, the wide variety of practices and the many biological processes involved. Games, represented as table games, video-games or mobile apps, are new materials to be used in the teaching processes within agro-ecology as also in environmental education and animal conservation. Here we present a video-game designed to contribute to integrated pest management education. We used the soft-skin fruit pest Drosophila suzukii, a widely spread invasive species as our study model. The Spotted-Stop-It video-game is a single-player game which encourages participation, disseminates knowledge on the pest problem and its potential solutions (i.e, harvest frequency, sanitation, and management of alternative non-crops) and highlights the importance of good practices from an agro-ecological approach to minimize pest damage by this fly, at the farmer scale. Here we present the game and show results of it through a survey among players.

Results/Conclusions:

Our game can influence participants perspective on how to manage a pest. In a rural technology fair, where we presented the game and performed a simple survey we noted that that despite the fact that most participants did not know about the fly prior to playing the game (34 ind., 68%), they could recognize it among other species of flies, after playing the game (23 ind., ~65%). Also, 21 individuals answered about its effects on soft-skin fruits correctly. Our game shows that training of future generations on alien insects and the problems they cause to food and fiber production, together with good agro-ecological practices is possible by resorting to elements and practices known and handled by modern day society. Our findings provide another example of the use of a flexible learning tool to the service of sustainable crop protection.