Water Adventurers
Context and challenges: making a public body’s work easy to grasp
For the Lavender Festival, SIAAP (the Paris region’s wastewater treatment authority) opened its grounds to the public to explain how wastewater is treated, through a game-based learning.
approach. The project had to meet three operational requirements:
Raise environmental awareness
Explain water treatment and the preservation of water resources in a playful way to families and local residents.
Showcase the site
Encourage visitors to explore four hectares of lavender fields that play an active part in treating water.
Manage large flows
Welcome 700 participants with no queues, thanks to staggered start times and self-guided stages.
A bespoke setup: an immersive large-scale game inspired by Jules Verne
To turn the day into a captivating discovery game , Arcane designed a bespoke game inspired by the world of Jules Verne. Participants followed in the footsteps of Captain Nemo to recover the plans of a water-cleaning machine and solve the mysteries surrounding the water cycle.
Investigation logistics built to handle the crowds
Running a public event for a local authority or public body means crowd flow has to be faultless. Our team deployed five facilitators to coordinate a departure every 15 minutes, linking separate arrival and finish points. Thanks to a detailed route book and a ride on a land train, each team made its way through the fields independently, without ever creating a bottleneck. This spatial planning meant players could hunt for hidden clues with no downtime from start to finish.
Game-based puzzles blending logic and chemistry
The experience blended the feel of an outdoor escape room with scientific investigation to create a format that is fun and instructive. Guided by an illustrated booklet, participants decoded encrypted messages, spotted markers in the field and tackled every playful challenge as a team. The highlight was a supervised hands-on workshop where children and adults filtered water themselves, bringing SIAAP’s environmental role to life for the people it serves.
Impact and feedback: a format that won people over and came back
The experience proved how effective gamification can be for public institutions looking to bring citizens closer to their infrastructure. The event drew 700 participants over the day with outstanding engagement, confirming the value of active learning over traditional, passive guided tours.
The event’s success led SIAAP to run the programme again the following year , keeping this spirit of openness alive:
FAQ: showcasing a site and engaging local communities
How can you modernise an open day to captivate a family audience?
Replacing the passive guided tour with a story-driven treasure hunt is the most effective way to engage families. Where a lecture-style tour quickly loses younger visitors, a self-guided quest turns children into the driving force of the experience and draws parents in too. That momentum extends time spent on site and encourages active discovery of the facilities.
How can you explain complex technical expertise without a top-down lecture?
Game-based learning turns technical processes into tangible puzzles and hands-on activities. Instead of summing up water treatment or flow management with dry diagrams, the game invites participants to filter water themselves or work through physical and chemical mechanisms to advance the plot. Scientific understanding comes through practice, with no off-putting jargon.
How can you improve how local residents perceive a technical facility?
Opening the site through an immersive adventure turns a potential source of concern into a shared place of discovery. By inviting residents into the heart of its natural and technical spaces around an engaging storyline, the institution demystifies its daily work, puts a human face on its teams and defuses local concerns through positive transparency.
How can you run an outdoor game without relying on a mobile app?
A printed expedition booklet combined with physical puzzles guarantees the best possible participation rate outdoors. This setup sidesteps network coverage issues, removes the barrier of downloading an app and avoids the digital divide. It encourages people of all ages to help one another, rather than isolating each member of the group behind a smartphone screen.
Take it further
To showcase your historic, natural or technical sites, explore our dedicated approaches to heritage and culture.
If you’re after a ready-to-play format to raise your teams’ awareness of CSR issues at a company offsite, take a look at our environmental awareness.
