On Friday, May 16, a conference was held at the Faculty of Electrical Engineering and Applied Computing of the University of Dubrovnik, where STEAM (Science, Technology, Engineering, Art and Mathematics) fields were promoted, study opportunities at the University of Dubrovnik were presented, and the results of the Play2Green project to date were presented.

The conference was attended by about a hundred students from four Dubrovnik high schools with their teachers, and the event itself consisted of a plenary session and five workshops.

As part of the plenary session, the Dean of the Faculty of Electrical Engineering and Applied Computing of the University of Dubrovnik, Anamaria Bjelopera, presented the Faculty and study opportunities at the University of Dubrovnik in the STEAM field, and Ivana Slošić, an assistant from the Faculty of Electrical Engineering and Computing of the University of Zagreb, presented the progress and results of the Play2Green project to date. Mihaela Kristić, an assistant at the Faculty of Electrical Engineering and Applied Computing, University of Dubrovnik, presented the serious game HoloZoo for mobile devices developed as part of a Play2Green project at the Faculty.

The plenary session was followed by two popular lectures on the topic of ecology. Marjan Žitnik from the Maritimo Recycling association gave a lecture in which he presented an ecological initiative to convert plastic waste into useful products, and Ana Bratoš Cetinić from the Department of Applied Ecology, University of Dubrovnik, gave a lecture on the need to protect marine organisms in the Adriatic.

The plenary presentations were followed by five workshops. At two workshops, participants had the opportunity to test two serious games, Green Siesta and HoloZoo, which were developed as part of the project.

Unlike “ordinary” games that are primarily intended for entertainment, serious games are designed for educational purposes, not exclusively for entertainment. Green Siesta is an artificial intelligence-based desktop game that teaches players the correct way to dispose of a type of waste at each level, while HoloZoo is a trivia game for mobile devices that introduces players to endangered animal species and the issues of their conservation. The HoloZoo game was developed at the Faculty of Electrical Engineering and Applied Computing, University of Dubrovnik, and uses holograms to display 3D models of endangered animal species, allowing students to observe them from different angles in real space and learn about them in this way.