Playing to understand the 2030 Agenda: NCS’s educational games
NCS maintains a series of free educational games that turn major sustainability themes into concrete decisions. Instead of explaining a concept and asking students to memorize it, each game places a real situation in the player’s hands — and lets the consequence do the teaching. There are seven titles, all running straight in the browser, with no sign-up and no collection of personal data.
The games are owned by CS Hub Tecnologia de Validação Ltda and licensed to NCS, which offers them free of charge as teaching material. Each one is calibrated to Brazil’s national curriculum (BNCC) and tied to specific Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs) of the UN’s 2030 Agenda.
Learning through consequence, not lecture
The teaching premise is the same across all seven games: there is no lesson text inside the match. Students learn by deciding and watching the result. Pay for something in installments and watch the interest eat into your cash in the months that follow; throw a farm’s production out of balance and feel the environmental impact come back as loss. The concept sticks, because it was lived.
This design lends itself to the classroom: the teacher opens the conversation, students play and compare paths, and the lesson closes by revisiting the concepts each decision brought to the surface.
Each game, a slice of the 2030 Agenda
Together, the seven games span all 17 SDGs — one of them, Agenda 2030 Show, covers the full seventeen; the others dig into specific slices, from water use to the household budget.
Choices — financial education (SDGs 4, 8 and 12)
A life simulator where every financial decision has consequences. The player moves through life, from childhood pocket money to a first job, facing real trade-offs: spend or save, pay in installments or wait, study or work. It works on quality education (SDG 4), decent work (SDG 8) and responsible consumption (SDG 12) without ever pausing the game to deliver a lecture.
Agenda 2030 Show — all 17 SDGs
An auditorium-style quiz with 850 questions covering the seventeen goals. It has a classic mode, per-SDG training and answer review — a broad entry point to the entire 2030 Agenda, from middle school to high school.
Gota Certa — water (SDGs 6 and 12)
A water droplet falls across three lanes while the player dodges the drain and the open faucet and collects rainwater harvesting, filtering and an extra life. It is a fast metaphor for conscious water choices, tied to clean water and sanitation (SDG 6) and responsible consumption (SDG 12).
Agro Defender — production and climate (SDGs 12 and 13)
A tower defense that puts the player in charge of a farm in Paraná, balancing production, profit and the environment across waves of adversity. It shows, in practice, the tension between producing and preserving — responsible consumption and production (SDG 12) and climate action (SDG 13).
NCS Guardiões — Brazilian biomes (SDGs 12, 13 and 15)
The player commands a drone over farms in the four Brazilian biomes — Cerrado, Pantanal, Caatinga and Atlantic Forest — balancing production and sustainability against climate and biological events. It articulates responsible consumption (SDG 12), climate action (SDG 13) and life on land (SDG 15).
Eco Sprint — ecosystems (SDGs 11, 13, 14 and 15)
A 3D endless runner through three alternating ecosystems — city, forest and ocean. A thematic successor to Gota Certa, it articulates four goals through mechanics alone: sustainable cities (SDG 11), climate action (SDG 13), life below water (SDG 14) and life on land (SDG 15).
Fazenda NCS — community (SDGs 1, 8 and 11)
A management simulation in which the player takes over a poor city and, month by month, plants, builds infrastructure and balances social indicators — hunger, employment, education, environment and safety — to lift it out of vulnerability. It touches no poverty (SDG 1), decent work (SDG 8) and sustainable communities (SDG 11).
Bringing it to the classroom
All the games are gathered in one place, in the site’s Games section (ncs.org.br/jogos), each with its own overview page — audience, curriculum and SDG links, and suggested uses. They work offline after the first visit and can be installed as an app on a phone.
These are materials open to use by schools and educators. For suggestions on classroom use or partnerships, the NCS team is available through the contact form on the site.
You can also explore the work of CS Hub Tecnologia de Validação Ltda, the owner of the games: hubcs.com.br.