Using Virtual Reality to Teach Kids About Marine Plastic Pollution
How an underwater 360 film reached thousands of kids in the Philippines and inspired them to protect their reefs.
“It’s so beautiful underwater!” “So many fish!” “I want to go there!” “I feel like I’m floating!,” students exclaimed as they watched “Grandpa’s Reef,” the underwater 360 film that my team and I produced.
It’s March 2019 and, along with suitcases full of Virtual Reality headsets, headphones, and posters, I’m on the island of Mindoro in the Philippines with my colleague Erina Molina, a marine scientist and National Geographic Explorer. We’re here to run an educational campaign for “Grandpa’s Reef” which the rest of our team (director Vanina Harel, underwater cameraman Kyle McBurnie and sound recordist Ben Mirin) shot in the same place the year before. The 360 film is inspired by the real stories and experiences of local fishers. It tells the story of a young girl who learns about the degradation of her local reef from her grandfather and decides to dedicate her life to protecting it.
As part of our distribution campaign, we’ve been holding public screenings of the Tagalog version of the film (“Bahura Ni Lolo”) in different parts of the island and we’ve been touring 5 junior high schools to show the film as part of a lesson on marine plastic pollution. This educational campaign in the schools is the core of our project — one of our main goals is to inspire young Filipinos to become ocean protectors.
The lesson we created revolves around a design challenge. Students learn about 4 animals featured in the film, about how different types of plastic harms them, and then together they come up with creative ideas to solutions to this problem. To maximize our impact and reach, we have partnered with one of the leading conservation NGOs in the Philippines, the Haribon Foundation. They are on the field with our team, along with one of their “Eco Vans” (a biodiversity classroom on wheels). They’re also our long-term distribution partner: they will be screening our film and facilitating the accompanying lesson through their own regular educational programs in the coming months and years.
By the end of our short campaign on the field, 10 days later, we achieved so much more than we set out to do. Our film had been viewed in person by over 1,200 people both kids and adults, roughly half of which also participated in our lesson and design challenge (we have now also reached over 190,000 views on Youtube). The participating students also took a pledge at the end of the lesson and committed to reduce their usage of at least one type of plastic. The pledge now hangs in the classroom as a reminder to their collective commitment.
One of the most exciting outcomes of the project is that students, through the design challenge, generated over 100 unique creative solutions for marine plastic problems, each depicted in its own beautiful poster. These ideas ranged from starting a non-profit to organizing a gamified coastal clean-up event, from making a short film to designing a scientific experiment on plastic debris. Some groups wrote poems or made a comic-book story from the point of view of a coral. Most ideas were so creative that they defied the suggested categories. We documented these ideas and left them with the students so they could continue to build on them and actualize them in their community.
We know the students loved our film: we’d see a look of pure joy on their faces while they watched it and afterwards they would gather with their classmates and talk about what they saw. We wanted to ensure that we captured this excitement and that we systematically measured the impact of our project. To do this we had students fill out a survey before and after watching the film and taking part in the lesson. From this data, we know that most students felt inspired watching our film and want to do more to reduce ocean plastic pollution. Additionally, 95% of students said that the activities they did with us inspired them to protect the ocean. When we interviewed them to probe more on this, one of them said “I was really amazed with what I saw and I was encouraged that we really need to protect our oceans so we can preserve the beauty of our corals.”
“I was really amazed with what I saw and I was encouraged that we really need to protect our oceans so we can preserve the beauty of our corals.” — Student
But perhaps the most interesting finding was that a large percentage of students (~50%) had never been snorkeling before and ~20% didn’t know how to swim, despite living on coastal areas. This means a lot of these students had never seen or experienced their incredible local reefs, which are one of the world’s top diving destinations. You cannot protect what you don’t know. That’s why it was so powerful to see that 90% of students said they felt like they were underwater during the film — it means that most of them experienced and got to know their local reef (almost) first-hand for the first time in their lives. Other exciting data points in our analysis:
- the most used words in students open ended responses about what they learned were “ocean” and “protect,” often used together in “protect the ocean”;
- ~90% of students said they felt inspired by the film and that the film inspired ideas for the design challenge;
- there was a pattern in the data suggesting that students understood how different types of plastic affected marine ecosystems and how a pressing issue in the Philippines is that most products they need on a daily basis are only available in plastic.
Overall, based on our impact analysis, we can see that this format (immersive storytelling paired with a hands-on lesson) seems really promising in the context of conservation education. We are hoping more people will experiment with this and continue to collect data.
I believe the reason why this format is so powerful is because of emotional arc students go through during our activity:
It’s pretty much the man-in-the-hole story arc in lesson form. If we look at the journey from start to end, most students start off with some understanding or connection to a topic —in this case local reef ecosystems. Then, through the VR film, they feel a sense of awe and wonder about reefs. In our case, students would literally laugh ecstatically, shout and run around and talk to their classmates about the film. After that moment though, comes the reckoning: students learn that the ecosystem is at risk. The beautiful sea turtles, corals and whale sharks they saw are being harmed by plastic waste. This is a key moment to take advantage of, to provide an answer to “Oh no! What can I do?”. The design challenge at the end teaches them a framework to solve problems in their own community and makes them feel conservation issues have tangible solutions. The impact is the difference in emotional connection to the topic that students started with vs ended with. Even if there is a little difference from beginning to end, that’s an important outcome, because a little passion for a topic can go a long way. I always told myself that if just one student out of the 1,000 we showed the film to became a conservationist as a result, this entire project would have been a success. Of course, as a team we set more ambitious goals.
Looking to the future, we are hoping the arc will point upwards. We donated our VR headsets and headphones to Haribon Foundation, so they can continue to show the film and embed our lesson in their programming. Thanks to them, so many more students around the Philippines will watch our film and learn about plastic pollution in their local reefs. We hope this will inspire them to become ocean stewards.
Watch our film on National Geographic’s Youtube channel 🐠
Download the lesson materials here 📓
Watch the behind-the-scenes video of our campaign here 📹
Thanks to the National Geographic Society for funding the project, Haribon Foundation and its volunteers for collaborating with us on the film campaign, the National Geographic Measurement and Evaluation team for helping with the impact measurement, the project team Vanina Harel, Kyle McBurnie, Erina Molina, Ben Mirin, Mateo Hernandez and Glenn Barit (who took all the incredible photos and videos of the campaign).
