  Educators often seek ways to introduce gaming in the classroom in order to
break the usual teaching routine, expand the usual course curriculum with
additional knowledge, but mostly as a means to motivate students and increase
their engagement with the course content. Even though the vast majority of
students find gaming to be appealing and a welcome change to the usual teaching
practice, many educators and parents doubt their educational value; in this
paper, we discuss a card game designed to teach environmental matters to early
elementary school students, using open data. We present a comparative study of
how the game increased the students' interest for the subject, as well as their
performance and engagement to the course, compared with conventional teaching
and a Prezi presentation used to teach the same content to other student
groups.
