The Art Nouveau Path: Curriculum-Aligned Heritage Learning for Urban Resilience and Sustainability Competences

Cultural heritage can contribute to urban resilience by supporting education that builds stewardship and civic agency. This study evaluates whether the Art Nouveau Path, an outdoor mobile augmented reality heritage game in Aveiro, Portugal, can serve as a curriculum-aligned pathway for urban resilience and sustainability competences in formal education. A curriculum translation matrix mapped eight points of interest and 36 tasks to Portugal’s curricular frameworks, Education for Sustainability themes, and GreenComp competences, and was examined as a design artefact to support adoption and scalability. Empirical evidence comprised accompanying teachers’ in-field observations (T2-OBS; N = 24 across 18 sessions) and students’ post-activity survey data (S2-POST; N = 439), including open-ended narratives. Narratives were analyzed using a directed resilience-mechanism codebook, with high intercoder agreement (Krippendorff’s alpha = 0.91). Teachers reported very high willingness to participate again (M = 5.75/6, SD = 0.44) and perceived contribution to sustainability competences (M = 5.08/6, SD = 0.72), while observing frequent care for public space and heritage (83.33%). Students strongly endorsed learning Education for Sustainability through local heritage (98.41%). By foregrounding curriculum translation and mechanism-based narrative analysis, the study contributes an adoption-oriented model for scaling heritage-based mobile learning within urban resilience agendas.