We don’t have a Planet B!
By Dina Manzillo, 2022
Our Planet is at risk and we are seeing it day by day. Scientists are extremely concerned about what is happening to our planet, from global warming that causes glaciers to melt, the increase of the greenhouse effect, and the spreading of the ozone hole. Additionally, the excessive use of plastic is also polluting our seas so much that it is practically common to hear on the news about animals dying from plastics or to discover in the fish that we eat large quantities of microplastics. Other elements that are leading to serious climate change, which is destroying our planet, are industries and the use of toxic gases and fuels.
Perhaps the most worrying thing is that this responsibility to safeguard our Planet, it is not equally felt by all citizens. People let this matter slip from their minds, they ignore it as if it were not their own business.
Furthermore, habits are hard to die, so the smartest thing to do is to get children used to behaving in a certain way, so that they can walk in the world without destroying it. The goal should be to make them safeguard the earth without them being aware of it. Acting spontaneously is probably the most effective way. Doing good for ourselves and the world without any effort, without the idea that it is a duty, behaving responsibly without feeling the burden of responsibility.
In this framework, it’s necessary to highlight that the aim of this article is to raise awareness by teaching the younger generation about the consequences of climate change and marine pollution, as they will be the future leaders.
First and foremost, it is necessary to mention that this article is a real project proposal, a series of interactive and gamified workshops and laboratories concerning environmental and civic education to be integrated into the primary school curriculum (4th -5th grade)over a medium to long period of time.
Based on this previous statement, the main purpose of this article is to introduce “The world I wish” as a primary school learning activity in order to broaden knowledge of environmental issues and to raise awareness and respect for the world around us.
In this respect, for this project two of the 17’s Sustainable Goals of the 2030 Agenda of the United Nations were selected accurately, “Climate Action” and “Life below water”.
It’s essential to point out that this project was structured around innovative and technological teaching approaches. In addition, I personally carried out an in-depth research and analysis study on the “Co-designing schools toolkit”. In this regard, three different learning practices were selected and taken into consideration for this project: “Cross pollinated classes”, “Project based learning”, “Real- world topics”, “Learning Galleries”, “Exhibitions and presentations of learning; as these are interdisciplinary workshops through which the children embrace different issues by analyzing and linking them with different study subjects.
At the end of this project, students will be able to share the learning outcomes with their family and friends and discuss the real threat of climate change to convince them to make important changes. Indeed, this project aims to bring about behavioral change, enabling students to find solutions and take action that will have a major impact and even change society’s mindset to improve climate justice.
On one hand, from the educator standing point, this project proposal will cover the following instructional purposes:
· Game-based learning, critical thinking and problem-solving
· Creativity and imagination
· Opportunities for promoting new digital initiatives
· Inter-disciplinary approaches to climate change
· Create a comfortable atmosphere towards the subject, help learners feel the urgency of taking actions and risks.
On the other hand, from the student standing point, based on the Bloom’s Taxonomy revised version, at the end of the project the following learning objectives will be achieved:
- Acquire and interpret information
- Understand that these changes are
also due to human action - Identify and understand what are the
climate factors - Recognize the elements through which climate manifest itself
- Deal with problematic situations
- Discuss on groups about different topics
- Demonstrate solid communication skills
- Execute “virtuous behaviors” to put slow down these changes.
- Develop a basic Serious educational game using Scratch
- Improve Computational thinking in all disciplines as a set of mental processes that enable the identification of problems and possible pathways leading to solutions
- Understanding the commands of the Scratch language, and programming applied to educational robotics.
Throughout this project, primary school students will have the opportunity to work on teams, to get familiar with serious educational game software, platforms such as Scratch and tools and to create both digital and physical prototypes. Within this scenario, it is extremely important to underline that this experience was designed taking into account the Gradual Immersion Method (GIM). Accordingly, the GIM is a transformation-sensitive form of creativity and learning exploration involving a collaborative
approach to 3D digital creation. Supported by Augmented Reality (AR) technique, which promotes intuitive learning, the GIM
focuses on three modules such as familiarization, co-creation and exhibition.
Concerning the 1st module “ Familiarization”, a valuable activity to help children become familiar with with environmental education and consolidate a long-term sustainable lifestyle by learning how to sort their rubbish in a fun way is to invent a playful educational workshop based on the storytelling technique. It’s named “Saving Fairy Tales from pollution and the consecutive climate change impact“, consisting of several modules featuring characters and settings from the most popular classic children’s fairy tales all over the World. Each module will be preceded by an introductory theoretical part and will be related to one specific topic, for example one of the modules in question could be on the importance of waste sorting, since the waste topic is crucial to reduce the environmental impact of our existence on this planet. Accordingly, the main objective of such a module would be to educate children about waste sorting, highlighting the environmental value of proper waste management.
Indeed, by devising and listening to stories, children make sense of the reality around them, thanks to the symbolic function that links sensitive experience to their desires, dreams and imagination. Therefore, storytelling is an inexhaustible resource to support creativity and imagination: useful for identity, socio-affective-emotional and cognitive development in a broad and transversal sense. Consequently, a suitable activity for this specific module could be an unplugged activity on coding in a storytelling format aimed at educating the children on waste sorting, highlighting the environmental value of correct waste management, so as to develop autonomy in the management of spaces and materials, but also, to introduce them to computational thinking.
The scenario in which children will be immersed is the sea, related with the topic to save from pollution life under water. Indeed, the heart of the workshop is to immerse them in a sea devastated by rubbish, where chaos reigns. In this regard, this workshop has been named “There’s too much plastic at the bottom of the sea” and takes up the Little Mermaid fairy tale written by Andersen. The workshop starts introducing the Little mermaid, Ariel, who lived at the bottom of the sea with her father and her six sisters. Life on the seabed was beautiful and exciting, among fish and corals, but in recent years something was changing. At the age of fifteen, as is the tradition for all mermaids, Ariel is allowed to swim to the surface and admire the land. The mermaid finds before her a ruined sea with waters flooded with plastic and rubbish, the same rubbish that was polluting her beloved seabed and trapping her fish friends to death.
Consequently, children’s role will be to carry out the instructions given to them by the programmer during the narrative flow and thus help Ariel to save her world, the sea, from serious pollution and to introduce them to the urgency to moderate the climate change impact.
The adventure in which children will be involved is to help Ariel who has to call her best friend Flounder, a yellow and blue tropical fish to go to Sebastian house to observe humans life and world taking care to collect plastic bottles, glasses along the way so that they can be correctly disposed of in the respective recycling bin.
In order to do this, the instructions to be given to the children are:
Step 1. Go to Flounder’s home;
Step 2. Avoid being trapped by the waste lying on the seabed.
Step 3. Collect the plastic bottles and glasses;
Step 4. Dispose of plastic bottles and glasses in their respective recycling bin to be able to reach Sebastian’ house.
Step 5. Go to Sebastian;
Step 6. Finally observe the human objects that Sebastian has collected.
Additionally, for the implementation of this activity it was necessary to invent the story (as previously described), a setting, draw four 4x5 grids on the floor, create cards with arrows indicating the movements to be made (forward, turn right, turn left), plastic bottles, plastic glasses and bin , create silhouettes of the main characters, some of them functioning as obstacles, others as aids or magical objects required to complete the mission successfully.
In accordance with the second module “Co-creation”, students will be divided into groups in order to participate in a collaborative and creative activity, which aim is to encourage children to adopt a new lifestyle and become aware of recycling and creative reuse of recovered materials, could be to show them Wall-e cartoon and to invent a mission laboratory to engage children interest.
According to the previous statement, the name of this activity is “Wall-e recycling mission 2.0”. The mission can take place in closed places such as schools, historical buildings and museums or in open spaces such as gardens, parks and squares. In the first stage of the mission, bizarre characters will use riddles, games and stories to introduce children to the world of paper, plastic and other recyclable materials, transforming the space into a magical, timeless place.
In addition, to successfully complete the first stage of this activity, children need to collect plastic, paper and cardboard, fabric scraps, buttons, wool threads, ribbons, wood and cork scraps, all materials to be reused for the second stage of this activity.
The educational-didactic itinerary is based on the child’s natural curiosity about the environment around him, through guided exploration and continuous discovery, stimulating creativity and the ability to design and invent new forms.
The stages of the activity enhance children’s games and creativity by engaging them in the design and construction of objects using materials from the separate collection of “ trash “.
Specifically, children are invited to work with their team members to create their own customized superhero bin (physical prototype), which will help and support them in saving the world from pollution and climate change throughout the school year. Since there are four bins needed: paper, plastic, organic and glass, it would be appropriate to divide children into a total of four teams.( Project based-learning practice)Considering that this activity help children to distinguish between waste proper and reusable material and allows them to assign a new value to what is normally considered as waste to be disposed of, the main objective is to educate children in recycling and reusing materials, reducing the amount of trash on our planet.
In addition, it’s extremely well known that playful activities fulfil a fundamental function in the life of every child. According to Maria Montessori, “ game is the child’s task”, game is understood as “the activity most conducive to the physical, mental and intellectual development of children” through this method children not only enter real life much earlier, but learn to explore the world and its mechanisms in autonomy and freedom, becoming active subjects, the true protagonists of their education and growth”. The principle of becoming active subjects and protagonists through play is a right that could be applied to environmental education at school and at home. Therefore, it is essential to emphasize that common sense and awareness of environmental and pollution problems should prompt them to be more careful and respectful of the rules, in order to protect the world and its resources: natural, energy, plants, animals.
Last but not least, regarding the third module “Exhibition” children will be involved in a laboratory designed on Game based-learning methodology and Serious educational games. The planned activity for this stage is to help children understand programming and blocking language, using Scratch in order to develop serious game prototypes on climate change and sea pollution with the aim to help their peers become familiar with those topics and to communicate the risks.
At the end of the laboratory children will exhibit their Digital serious game prototypes as the “Learning galleries” and “Exhibitions and presentations of learning” practices were recalled. Therefore, children will have the possibility to share their learning experience with the community.
Project Flow Chart
To evaluate all the activities included in this project, it’s recommended to take into consideration:
- Rubric from the instructor’s perspective
2. Student’s self-assessment(process-understanding-product) will be based on the following questions:
- Are you fully engaged?
- Do you use your time wisely?
- Have you come to class prepared with research and materials?
- Did you grasp the nature and properties of different materials?
- Can you manipulate them and use them appropriately?
- Did you treat the materials, tools, and space respectfully?
- What was difficult?
- What did you do when you didn’t know what to do?
- What would you do differently next time?
- Why did they choose a certain format, such as a three-dimensional object rather than a two-dimensional one, to convey their ideas?
- Why did you use certain materials?
3. Instead of Educator’s self-assessment that will be based on those questions: 21st Century Skills & Attributes
In conclusion, educating children to create an ecological conscience becomes easy when, through play and expression, simple but very significant paths are activated that become, with habit, lifestyles.
References
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Arnab, S., Lim, T., Carvalho, M. B., Bellotti, F., de Freitas, S., Louchart, S., … De Gloria, A. “Mapping Learning and Game Mechanics for Serious Games Analysis”, British Journal of Educational Technology, 2015, 46(2), p. 391–411.
Codesigning Schools Toolkit. (n.d.). Retrieved May 31, 2022, from https://www.codesigningschools.com/
Creating an Authentic Maker Education Rubric. (n.d.). Edutopia. Retrieved June 1, 2022, from https://www.edutopia.org/blog/creating-authentic-maker-education-rubric-lisa-yokana
Gerstein, J. (2015, January 16). The Other 21st Century Skills: Educator Self-Assessment. User Generated Education. https://usergeneratededucation.wordpress.com/2015/01/16/the-other-21st-century-skills-educator-self-assessment/
Romero, M., & Barma, S. “Teaching pre-service teachers to integrate Serious Games in the primary education curriculum”, International Journal of Serious Games, 2(1), 2015.
Rossiter, M., & Garcia, P. A. “Digital storytelling: A new player in the narration field”, New Directions for Adult and Continuing Education, 2010(126), p. 37–48. Disponible à http://doi.org/10.1002/ace.370.
Sanabria, J. C., & Arámburo-Lizárraga, J. (2017). Enhancing 21st Century Skills with AR:Using the Gradual Immersion Method to develop Collaborative Creativity. EURASIA Journal of Mathematics, Science and Technology Education, 13(2). https://doi.org/10.12973/eurasia.2017.00627a