Aloha, and welcome to the project site for the Kukui Cup. The Kukui Cup Project explores novel ways to utilize concepts from information technology, community-based social marketing, serious games, and educational pedagogy to support sustained change in sustainability-related behaviors. The current focus of the Kukui Cup Project is residence hall energy challenges. In future, we plan to expand to other contexts (primary and secondary schools, offices, residential neighborhoods) and sustainability resources (water, waste, food, etc.) 

Kukui Cup challenges blend real world and online activities, all tied together through game mechanics.   In the real world, players participate in workshops, excursions, and artistic/musical events.  They win prizes, and most importantly, learn about their current lifestyle and its impact on sustainability behaviors.  In the online Kukui Cup web application, players earn points, achieve badges, increase their sustainability "literacy" through readings and videos, and use social networking mechanisms to engage with friends and family about the issues raised. The challenge is designed to make the real and online world activities complementary and synergistic.

Kukui Cup challenges are typically designed with the following goals for its participants:

Kukui Cup challenges are built upon custom open source technology developed by the Collaborative Software Development Laboratory at the University of Hawaii.   Our technology is designed to enable designers to (relatively) easily define and integrate new challenges for energy, water, waste, food, and allow sites to easily customize their instance of the Kukui Cup with the challenges best suited to their situation.