Building a Waste Sorting and Recycling Awareness App for Secondary School Students in Osun State

Environmental awareness and waste management education are inadequately embedded in Nigerian secondary school curricula, contributing to poor recycling culture among youth in Osun State, South West Nigeria. This project builds a gamified waste sorting and recycling awareness mobile application targeting secondary school students in Osun State. The app is developed using Unity with a C# backend, delivering interactive sorting mini-games, recycling quizzes, and environmental impact simulators. The design thinking methodology drives user empathy research conducted in five public secondary schools across Osogbo, Ede, and Ife. The application features a virtual environment where players sort waste into bins, earn points for correct sorting, unlock environmental facts, and compete on school leaderboards. A randomised controlled study with 120 students compared knowledge and attitude changes between app users and a control group over eight weeks. Results show a 66 percent improvement in correct waste categorisation among app users compared to 14 percent in the control group. Teacher surveys also indicate that the app supplements classroom environmental education effectively. The study recommends integration into the Osun State secondary school ICT curriculum and collaboration with the Osun State Environmental Protection Agency for content validation. Keywords: waste management, gamification, secondary school, Osun State, recycling awareness