Abstract:

Technology rapidly changed our everyday lives and inserted us into a new digital era. These changes are seen everywhere — in our homes, jobs, and cars. However, even with this technological advance, we are still solving problems as we did several years ago. Inevitably, the question arises: "Why don't we use new specialized tools for problem-solving to fight the complexity of the arising new problems?". We tend to think about solving problems as we've always done because this is what we've learned to do since a young age. As an entirely different degree of complexity has emerged in our century, the contribution of citizens, especially the young generation and communities, in problem-solving is of utmost importance to be supported by educational institutions, especially schools, promoting and leading students and educators to take action and encouraging each other to change their mindsets. Following the above, five European organizations from Spain, Portugal, Croatian, and Cyprus designed and implemented the project" Plan for Green Opportunities: Be A Digital scientific changemaker" (PARADIGM), a European-funded collective project under the framework of the Erasmus+ program. The partnership has identified the need for raising environmental awareness and decided to develop a project targeting the school community.

PARADIGM aims to use the appropriate technological infrastructure (devices, data platforms and tools) to empower the active engagement of citizens in taking action against climate change and for sustainable development through better monitoring and observing the environment and its environmental impacts. The project's activities focus on designing and developing an E-learning course for ecological awareness, an IoT-STEM-based environmental observatories framework, and designing and developing a citizen science platform serving as the PARADIGM Virtual Maker Space and Repository. The IoT framework is designed to comprise of Do it Yourself (DIY) like experimental platforms (embedded microcontrollers like the well-known Arduino, sensors, connectors and packaging kits etc.) interoperable with cloud-based IoT data aggregation platforms to set up the necessary dashboards for data analysis and visualizations, supported by a complete set of technical datasheets as well as detailed lesson plans for teachers to introduce relevant challenges in their classrooms.The specific study presents the pedagogical approach of PARADIGM, focusing on the training curricula for environmental awareness designed on the problem-based learning (PBL) approach. Furthermore, by introducing environmental observatories, educators are taught to coordinate with students to manage and collect data on natural resources via an environmental data monitoring process (selection, analysis, and interpretation of data on the PARADIGM platform). Finally, PARADIGM develops a set of plausible interactions for a given ecosystem via a scenario planning process, enabling learners to participate in fundamental cutting-edge research across environmental issues, increasing its visibility within the European public and discourse. Through the latter, the learners will acquire additional competencies that will make them competitive in the labour market and advance their skills through novel educational methodologies promoting STEM-oriented activities and raising awareness concerning environmental issues.

Keywords:

Educational framework, Environmental education, Erasmus project, Internet of things.