Abstract:

The paper introduces the design and evaluation of an environmental educational board game "Don’t Give Up, Planet!" prepared for lower-secondary school pupils, which was created and implemented using the methods of project teaching and peer teaching. It was designed and implemented by the pupils of Eco-Team from the Eco-School of the Bishop Grammar School Bohosudov aged 14-18 for their schoolmates from the lower-secondary school. (Eco-school is the largest international environmental program in the world with 16,000,000 pupils from 49,000 schools and 64 countries participating). Pupils thus gained information about global issues and natural phenomena through other forms and methods than they were used to.

According to the curriculum in the Czech Republic, pupils in the last years of the lower-secondary school and the first years of grammar schools learn about natural phenomena (such as earthquakes, volcanic activity, tsunamis, avalanches, landslides, ozone layer), as well as environmental and global issues (such as emissions and immissions, acid rain, greenhouse effect, global warming, floods, forest fires, ozone layer depletion, oil spills, desertification, salinisation, urbanization). Pupils have problems to understand some of the phenomena, they find it hard to make connections, they find learning boring and too theoretical. Research shows that even older pupils at secondary schools and students at universities have difficulties in understanding these phenomena and issues.

The pupils of Eco-Team came up with the idea of designing an ecological board game, in which they would bring the natural phenomena and global issues closer to their schoolmates. The design and evaluation of the board game was created by the project method, it was a spontaneous, medium-term project. The game was designed by 15 members of the Eco-Team aged 14-18 from January 2018 to April 2018, and in May 2018 it was implemented by 125 pupils from years 6 and 9 of the lower-secondary school and years 1 and 2 of the grammar school. To design the game, the pupils used their own knowledge, books, the Internet, magazines, consultations with their teachers.

An evaluation questionnaire was also designed with pupils, in which respondents answered open questions; whether they liked or disliked the game and why, what they learned through the game and what mark they would give it (the same as in school: 1 as the best evaluation, 4 as the worst). The evaluation questionnaires were processed using descriptive and inductive statistics. The hypothesis that the data originates from normal distribution was rejected (Shapiro-Wilk W = 0,667; p < 0,001), non-parametric methods of inductive statistics were used for further analyses, specifically the Mann-Whitney U test and the Kruskal-Wallis test. No statistically significant difference in the game evaluation was found in relation to gender or the school year of the pupils. The average game rating was 1,524. 87% of the respondents liked the game.

Keywords:

Educational game, environmental, ozone layer, global warming, emissions, immissions, peer teaching.