Schools, as dynamic microcosms, house diverse members with unique roles, capabilities, and perspectives, influencing and being influenced by local contexts. However, their role in neighbourhood energy transitions is often overlooked. Greengage addresses this gap, offering a transformative monitoring tool developed through interdisciplinary collaboration across 12 European secondary schools.

Greengage is a socio-technical digital solution designed to impart energy knowledge and foster a representative and inclusive learning community. It serves as a collective monitoring tool for a school community to learn about their social and technical contexts that influence their energy consumption and comfort.

Greengage structures the activity of monitoring based on an energy literacy framework. It gives shape to the activity of monitoring by means of Q&A’s in the form of dilemmas, myths, and preferred scenarios. Visual metaphors provide feedback loops to the community on the monitoring process and outcomes. Greengage’s implementation involves 10-inch tablets as digital interactive displays in public areas and an informative large display in a public area.

Key to its success is the use of recognition and procedural justice principles enabling inclusive and collective learning of both hard and soft competencies including cognitive, behavioural, and affective. It combines design techniques of storytelling, gamification, and data visualisation to make learning a playful and sustained practice:

1. Greengage applies storytelling to build an engaging collective learning narrative:
a. E-dentities, E-menies, and E-lemints: characters representing energy social context, social barriers, and energy technical context respectively.
b. Q&A’s formatted as dilemmas, preferred scenarios, and myths: interactions facilitating knowledge sharing of values, preferences and experiences on energy and comfort around daily activities.

2. Greengage implements gamification to build playful interactions for knowledge sharing:
a. Metaphors: A building school, rainbow, and foundations visualize and animate learning progress, encouraging engagement and sustained learning practices.
b. Scoring: The intensity and colourfulness of the rainbow and the physical aspect of the school building visualise the quantification of the frequency and diversity of answers and participation of the community.

3. Greengage communicates the progress and impact of collective learning by means of visual feedback loops:
a. Progress of frequency and diversity of participation using the metaphor earlier explained.
b. Impact of self-reporting and sensing data of comfort and energy variables using two abstraction layers: high level of abstraction using non-technical language to enrich Q&A feedback by aligning answers with collective data and sensing data when available; low abstraction layer provides numeric visualizations of real-time and historical sensing data enhanced by e-lemints visual appearance.

Insights from Greengage implementation highlight three future development: the need to institutionalize learning interactions, support diverse learning levels, and explore cross-community collaborations by establishing Greengage Clubs, AI-supported learning paths, and social computational analysis for valuable local and global contexts insights. Greengage stands as a beacon, showcasing the transformative potential of school communities in accelerating energy transition in European cities.@en

Schools are learning communities where multiple stakeholders can collaborate to learn about energy efficiency, including via formal curricula, non-formal learning and day-to-day practices. Furthermore, by improving energy literacy among building occupants, the energy efficiency of schools can be improved. However, turning schools into learning communities rather than learning organizations is still problematic. This article details a case study realised in the form of the ENERGE project, which integrates technological, educational and practical activities in 13 post-primary schools from 6 European countries. Owing to an extensive collaboration of diverse stakeholders, the ENERGE project resulted in the origination of a learning community around energy efficiency in the schools. The outcomes of building a learning community within the ENERGE project included: capacity building (in the form of the ENERGE Committees and Teacher Network), the introduction of digital education (via the ENERGE digital platform), development of curriculum-based modules to raise energy literacy, and the establishment of a viable model for expanding ENERGE experience to other schools. The article concludes by explaining the benefits of the ENERGE approach for stakeholders.@en