Abstract:

Many international documents emphasize the need to develop knowledge and skills in science. Scientific literacy enables people to use scientific principles and processes in making personal decision and to participate to the development of society. In this framework Ecology, offering the opportunity to understand the relationships between organisms and the environment, is a high-performance domain in educational processes. Here, we present an ecological education initiative named EcoLogicaCup, carried out in Italy. It is the first national online competition on ecological topics for high schools. The aim of EcoLogicaCup is to stimulate the interest of young people about ecosystems that provide our society with goods and services. EcoLogicaCup awakes students and public opinion to problems regarding the health of our biosphere. Ecological subjects such as climate changes, biodiversity, ecosystem goods and services, sustainability are available on a multilingual web platform (www.ecologicacup.unisalento.it) where teachers and students study, exercise and finally play the competition. On the platform, schools teams register, study the topics in a collaborative work, answer questions and prepare themself in the best way for the final competition. Moreover, there is also the opportunity for students to follow some lectures in video-conference with researchers on Ecology. EcoLogicaCup is organized every year and has excited much interest in the previous editions, obtaining good results. Overall more or less three hundred schools participated to the initiative during the previous editions, and more than five hundred teams played the final competition with twelve students per team.

Keywords:

Education, e-learning, ecosystem, ecology, sustainability.