The ‘Family Blue Park’ conceived by YDreams for Gas Natural, one of Europe’s principal energy companies, inaugurated this past April 20th at the Dolce Vita Tejo Shopping Center on the outskirts of Lisbon. The theme park is comprised of interactive technologies that engage children through a series of games and activities that foster environmental awareness and teach energy efficiency.

The venue, geared at children between the ages of 6 and 10, is packed with interactive solutions that are fun and didactic. Activities on hand include interactive quizzes and games that simulate day to day situations in the home such as choosing the right kind of light bulbs, or selecting the most effective cycle on the washing machine. Other activities include blowing on miniature fan-blades or learning to use solar panels to generate renewable energies such as solar, wind and hydro.

The ‘Family Blue Park’, located in Dolce Vita Tejo’s central plaza, is open to the public daily through May 7th from 10h00 to 22h00. The park also welcomes and schedules daily school trips from all over Portugal.

To round off the theme park’s inauguration, Gas Natural held an awards ceremony for the winners of the Enerfixe competition an online game also developed by YDreams in 2009, to promote energy consumption awareness amongst children and young adults. The initiative brings together the ten top players and close to 200 of their respective classmates.

Have a peek at the video below, courtesy of TV Energia:

This is the challenge set forth by EnerFixe to over 300 schools in the north of Portugal and so far more than 2000 students have chosen to participate!

During 2008 Union Fenosa, an integrated energy operator, challenged YDreams to create a fun, innovative and educational game about energy efficiency. The goal was to reach students between the ages of 8 and 14 and teach them basic day-to-day actions that can lower energy consumption and reduce carbon emissions.

Working alongside BlueShark (a Lisbon-based game-design studio), we developed a point and click game concept. With the help of Union Fenosa’s Familia Blue, the gamer leads the avatar through several scenarios to detect appliances, light switches, air-conditioners and other objects and then make energy efficient choices, which will ultimately affect the electricity bill at the end of the month.

The design concept, created by Spanish designer Antonio Coca, was adapted to fit the game giving Enerfixe a really cool and distinguished look. We than added a fun and hip sound design by YDreams’ very own Nuno Pereira to set the right mood.

And that’s it!!! It really was that easy, because everyone pulled together by pitching ideas, choosing scenarios, defining game behaviors and essentially enjoying themselves.

The game was published online a week ago, and the results are awesome: more than 2,000 players have registered from 110 schools and over 5,500 games (and counting) have been played!

So, I dare you to beat the current best score! You can try it out at: www.enerfixe.com.pt

Just register and start playing. And remember you really can help planet Earth by reducing your daily carbon emissions.

EnerFixe on YouTube