An International Education Program at Urban/Rural High Schools: An Integrated View where Science, Technology, Art and Communication Converge
Abstract: Caring for our Watersheds (CNC) is an environmental education contest started by Agrium in Canada in 2007. Since 2012, it has been implemented in Argentina. The competition covers 36 high schools where the Areco River Basin is located. Every year groups of students work together with their teachers to participate and be evaluated. From the very beginning, CNC staff realized that this contest could be considered a great opportunity to train teachers and students on science and technology by using a STEM (Science, Technology, Engineering and Mathematics) approach and at the same time improve their ICT knowledge to manage multimedia concepts and tools in order to face the challenge of increasing ecological awareness in the Areco River Basin community. In short, the project in Argentina is framed by the STEM paradigm with a strong emphasis on putting the students’ project into practically achievable action from a combined educational, scientific, technological and social perspective.
Setting the context About the Areco River Basin The Areco River Basin, where this educational program is carried out, is located in the Province of Buenos Aires, Argentina. It has an area of approximately one million acres with a population estimated at 60,000. Except for some small towns, it is mainly an agricultural area, where most of its 36 high schools are scattered in the urban areas and the remaining ones are further away in the countryside. It is important to note that San Antonio de Areco, the main town, has been declared city of national historic interest by the Argentine government and it is a reference point in national and international tourism. It is a place where plenty of museums and all kinds of craftsmen working with wood, noble metals, silver, glass and mud are widely established.
About Caring for our Watersheds Caring for our Watersheds (CNC in Spanish), whose slogan is "Turning ideas into environmental solutions" is an environmental education contest started by Agrium in Canada in 2007 that engages students in preserving and improving their local watersheds. Youth across North America, Argentina and Australia are turning their environmental ideas into solutions. The Caring for our Watersheds program asks the question: "What can you do to improve your watershed?" Although the contest is not still offered in many urban/rural areas around the globe, the program encourages anyone to answer the question by taking action in its community. It was implemented in Argentina for the first time in 2012 in the town of San Antonio de Areco, province of Buenos Aires. The competition comprises 3rd, 4th and 5th year students from all public and private high schools in the Areco River Basin. Through the works presented by schools and elected by the relevant juries, the Caring for our Watersheds Program aims at facilitating the integration between teachers and learners by putting their projects into practically achievable action. About CNC - Blas Pascal Center, EdTech R&D
In 2014 CNC hired the Blas Pascal Center, which is centered on EdTech R&D and located in Buenos Aires, Argentina, to be responsible for teacher training in STEM and ICT encouraging them to improve their proposals by focusing on a transdisciplinary and transmedia approach. Since then, CBP has always been part of the CNC working group. At present, CBP is involved in a new collaboration program with the US space agency through SEMAA (NASA Science, Engineering, Mathematics and Aerospace Academy) located in Atlanta, Georgia, which is responsible for the STEM project in the U.S., with the aim of sharing knowledge, experiences and materials and pursuing STEM objectives in both countries. About STEM As a turning point in education, many developed countries have recently become aware of the crucial need to inspire a broad and diverse population of children and youth to choose science and technology programs and encourage their natural curiosity to find out from that perspective what the universe is, what the universe is made of and how it works. The STEM paradigm brings about the transversality and integration of these disciplines in a single and convergent project for elementary and high schools by focusing on mathematical and natural sciences programs, which are considered a fundamental issue in the modern world of work. The main objective of this scientific convergence model at school is to engage students, teachers and parents in the use of emerging technologies by providing a challenging curriculum that integrates the above mentioned four disciplines and distributing “hands-on, minds-on" educational materials, which -according to previous experiencesresults in a deeper and more meaningful way of acquiring knowledge.
About IT Infrastructure Conectar Igualdad (Linking Equality) is a one-to-one educational computing program, fully supported by the Government of Argentina. The program has already distributed three million netbooks into the nation’s public high and vocational schools, teacher training institutes and special education institutions. The program provides a package of hardware, software, services, and support, designed to work reliably together, as well as much-needed infrastructure improvements. In this context, full access to this mentioned equipment was provided to all students and teachers from the Areco River Basin, involved in the CNC Program.
About Funding The projects undertaken by CNC are mostly financed by Agrium, ASP (Agroservicios Pampeanos), its local partner in Argentina and other public and private funds. Regarding the coordination of the contents itself, several academic and non-governmental organizations (NGOs) give their support, depending on each project´s characteristics and the particular issues to be approached. In all cases, ICT support is given by the Blas Pascal Center. All activities are undertaken at Museo Las Lilas in San Antonio de Areco, considered the main town of the basin. The museum has a comfortable auditorium to spend a whole day working with teachers who come from distant places to be trained and teams of teachers and students who come to present their projects once a year. The museum also has a library with thousands of volumes totally available for developing a variety of learning activities.
Awareness and training plan
Since 2014, all training activities are based on multimedia educational materials specially developed by the Blas Pascal Center to be supported on the Web: an e-learning platform <www.learninglab.com.ar> designed and customized to satisfy CNC requirements and needs, blogs, multirmedia online conceptual maps and blackboards digitized and converted to interactive multimedia pdf educational materials. Every year in February, a full day workshop takes place to make teachers become aware of key issues to be developed during the school year. 2012 The first workshop aimed at setting up the main environmental issues to start working on the school projects. The conference subject was "Education for the Environment: Challenge and Opportunity". During the meeting an expert of the Argentine Ministry of Social Development and Environment addressed the environmental problems related to education, a second lecturer talked about future scenarios and a third one focused on urban planning and environmental law. At this point, CNC started the actual work with teachers and students from all the high schools scattered around the basin; teams of students working together with their teachers were organized to present their mid-year proposals. 36 works were submitted to be evaluated by two juries: a first round jury which chooses 10 finalists and another jury which ranks them. CNC drew up an implementation plan to ensure that all winning projects were progressively carried out. Some of the winning projects are described in the Results item.
2013 The second annual workshop was focused on "Caring for the Environment and the Future of Employment for Young Workers". This meeting intended the integration of educational needs related to environmental issues and the pursuit of new capabilities and skills required to meet the new sustainability work demands. The educational focus was addressed by three experts in environmental education, sustainable construction and environmental education from the labour perspective, respectively. 55 works were submitted to be evaluated as above mentioned and once again, CNC drew up an implementation plan to ensure that winning projects were progressively carried out. Some of the winning projects are described in the Results item.
2014 For the first time, the Blas Pascal Center was incorporated to the CNC Program. The training main topic was â&#x20AC;&#x153;ICT & LKT: Time to Learn, Time to Know". In order to show the ecological issue in a historical context, the museum library previously provided all necessary information and interactive documents were authored to explore the curious circumstance that the deforestation process went back to the XVI Century < http://cuidandolacuencadelareco.blogspot.com.ar/2014/02/perspectiva-historica.html>. Framing ICT implementation within the ecological project developed by CNC - Blas Pascal Center and providing teachers with concepts, methodologies and tools to develop better proposals together with their teams of students was the main goal of this meeting. All the educational materials developed are related and linked on the "Areco River Basin: An Interdisciplinary Approach" blog, available at <http://cuidandolacuencadelareco.blogspot.com>. The participants´ feedback was very positive and they asked for a more comprehensive and profound training.
Two months later, a three-month intensive training course through b-learning started. A Moodle e-learning platform was customized by Blas Pascal Center and three in-person meetings were held, while a variety of activities mainly related to multimedia authoring tools for teachers were carried out. 63 teachers organized in work groups took part in the course and during the last in-person meeting each work group presented and shared their achievements. All the educational materials developed are supported on the e-learning platform and also related and linked on the "Learning Materials Development: Born for the Web" blog, available at <http://cursoticxenareco.blogspot.com> “Online Conceptual Map. Web 2.+: from Internet to Ubiquity”. Available at < http://goo.gl/fR6ST7> 51 works were submitted to be evaluated as above mentioned and once again, CNC drew up an implementation plan to ensure that winning projects are progressively carried out. Some of the winning projects are described in the Results item.
2015 All projects are revised. The challenging task for this year is to improve through a recursive process the way information, ideas and concepts are expressed, which leads to a better thinking resulting in better projects capable of framing science, technology, engineering and math within a STEM paradigm and achieving a more effective transmedia communication for improving basin conditions as well as community awareness. Last February, the workshop was focused on "ICT & LKT at Areco II: Rethinking New Facts, and What We Have Done for Doing it Better", available at <http://tictacenareco2015.blogspot.com>
Results The chosen winning projects show the integration of STEM -needed to solve the problems of Areco river basinconverging with communication concepts, tools and demands in order to increase community awareness and help to make life better for its people. At this point, let´s the projects talk by themselves: Digester in an Agricultural School (2012) This project proposes an educational solution associated with environmental care. The assembly of an educational module that is primarily aimed at educating students to have a caring attitude toward the environment by dealing at school with a set of activities for the reuse of the effluent produced by the institution is proposed. The agricultural school curriculum involves poultry, swine and sheep production as well as a dairy cattle sector that produce consumer products effluent polluters. Installing a digester is proposed to transform manure into biogas and organic fertilizer for internal use. Additionally, multimedia educational materials are authored by teachers attending learning demands in math, physics, chemistry and biology. Content and Technical Support: Fundación ENERGIZAR Authoring Training IT Support: Centro Blas Pascal EdTech R&D Just like the Oven Bird (2013) This project began within the scope of a school located at Cucullu, a small rural village of 500 inhabitants, where the major work activity is the production of mud bricks. A survey conducted by the students showed lower income families associated with the brick kilns. With the help and guidance of an architect specialized in sustainable construction developments and in relation with the "Caring for our Watersheds" program, learners proposed the implementation of various sustainable housing solutions.. The final proposal is to improve a room that can be transformed into a kind of educational module for students and a recreational space. Once finished, this modular
room will be used to provide courses for students, their parents and siblings on the art of sustainable construction, thereby helping to improve housing conditions regarding temperature and energy. Additionally, multimedia educational materials are authored by teachers attending learning demands in math, physics, chemistry and biology. Content and Technical Support: Architect Guillermo DurĂĄn, an expert in sustainable architecture, accompanied by a group of undergraduate students. School of Architecture, Design and Urbanism. University of Buenos Aires. Authoring Training IT Support: Centro Blas Pascal EdTech R&D
Scientific, Technological and Artistic Wall Intervention (2014) Chosen as the 2014 Winning Project, students of a public school at San Antonio de Areco propose an artistic, scientific and technological still empty wall intervention so it concretely expresses environmental and educational aspects through art and science. The students intend to create on the wall an area that educates on sustainable production, by building a place where compost and vermicompost is produced by processing the school canteen solid waste in order to feed a vertical orchard built with plastic bottles and watered with water collected from rain and a drip irrigation system. Another section of the wall will frame the vertical orchard with drawings and relevant mathematical patterns occurring in nature, following Escher´s tessellations and fractals and the Fibonacci sequence. A third section will be placed with multimedia displays dealing with augmented reality ecological games developed by the school students or pendrives buried in the wall (dead drops) containing text and hypermedia files available to remove and place, both according to curricular issues of interest to the school community. The wall is expected to be visited by locals as well as tourists. So, the entire set of actions developed will be fully documented with QR (Quick-Response) codes in order to properly identify items of each wall section and give visitors not self-evident environmental and technical information. Content and Technical Support: CNC Program. IT Support: Centro Blas Pascal. EdTech R&D.
Ecological Multimedia Interactive Wall sketch: before and after
Measuring the Level of the Areco River (2014)
This proposal was presented by the students of the Technical School no. 1 "Carmen De Areco", a technical school with electronic guidance, both their teachers and students involved. It proposes the construction and operation of river level measurement units based on different types of sensors. Additionally, multimedia educational materials are authored by teachers attending learning demands in math, physics, chemistry and biology. Content and Technical Support: Laboratorio Abierto de ElectrĂłnica (LABI). School of Engineering of the University of Buenos Aires. Argentina. Authoring training IT Support: Centro Blas Pascal EdTech R&D Eco (recycling) bins (2014) Project submitted by the Colegio Los Robles at San AndrĂŠs de Giles. The proposal is focused on facing the issue of separation and waste management in a creative way for educating kindergarten and elementary students by building waste bins with special shapes that draw kidsâ&#x20AC;&#x2122; attention. Each bin is represented by a character with its name and interactive electronic devices (sounds, motion and position sensors) able to react every time they throw something inside and when the tanks are replenished. Additionally, multimedia educational materials are authored by teachers attending learning demands in math, physics, chemistry and biology. Content and Technical Support: School of Engineering Robotics Club. University of Buenos Aires. Argentina. Authoring training IT Support: Centro Blas Pascal EdTech R&D Grupo Viralata (visual artists).
First conclusions This is an ongoing project in its 4th year. Students have achieved significant IT knowledge and practice about hardware, software use, programming languages and platforms needed to carry on the proposals as well as communication tools and strategies to convince juries about accepting their own proposals. It is worthwhile to notice that, when students and their teachers decide to turn their ideas into an environmental project, they face many issues to be solved and, in this point, they are highly motivated for acquiring the IT knowledge and practice to realize it in time and form. Another source of motivation has to do with the possibility of submitting projects and being eligible for funding, which allow them to put projects into practice and be acknowledged for their hard work. Teachers are also motivated by the students and by the opportunity of being involved in an innovative program. Their main IT knowledge acquirement is related with computers and robotic training and authoring educational materials to teach science and art, according to the nature of each proposal. More broadly, the entire educational community has been respectfully welcomed and all activities have been held in a beautiful atmosphere at Museo Las Lilas, San Antonio de Areco. Round-trip transportation to their schools -no matter how far away they could be-, breakfast, lunch and snacks, printed materials, online e-learning platform and multimedia educational resources were provided. The local authorities of each district paid great attention to the project and now it is encouraged by municipalities as well as TV channels and radio stations which are willing to broadcast CNC Project news on advances in each goal. Regarding the school projects themselves, teachers and students training are now focused more systematically on the STEM paradigm, emphasizing knowledge acquisition of communication tools, platforms and strategies, mainly based on multimedia and augmented reality.
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