The competent interaction with our environment is essential for its well-being and therefore also for our own well-being. Such behavior is characterized by its relatedness to the environment. To behave in an environmentally competent manner, human individuals must therefore learn that they and their

actions are part of a human-environment relationship. They can do this by learning to associate themselves and their actions with their environment. Learning this association between oneself and the environment has the potential to establish the motivation for environmentally competent behavior. For this type of learning, human individuals must be enabled to experience that their behavior results in changes that affect both their environment and themselves. This can be implemented well in immersive virtual reality. We have therefore developed EcoWalk. This is a life-sized virtual environment for learning eco-friendly food choice by physically walking across this extended reality.

EcoWalk is a life-sized three-dimensional virtual environment for associative learning by walking on the omnidirectional treadmill from Infinadeck. The virtual environment of EcoWalk is programmed in a manner that depending on the carbon footprint of food its purchase is either triggering or reversing

climatic environmental changes such as heavy rain or flooding. In this project we will first invite advanced preservice teachers to individually use and accomplish the full EcoWalk learning experience themselves. Second, we will invite these preservice teachers to elaborate in group discussions on how EcoWalk can be integrated and used within a teaching unit in secondary school, i.e., what educational activities should be accomplished before and after exposing pupils to EcoWalk.

Dr. Aline Stämpfli, Agroscope

• Sandro Wolf
• Aline Niggeler

October 2025 – July 2026