Abstract:

Environmental pollution together with the problem of an increasing amount of electronic waste forces teachers to include these topics in their curricula. In this paper we describe our concept “Schrotty” which is based on the assumption that children need basic knowledge about electronics to become aware of the problems and dangers of unreflected and excessive consumption of electronic devices. Therefore we designed a series of workshops for children and young people from 9 to 17 years. The content of these workshops aims at and will be available for teachers and educators in order to communicate knowledge about electronics using abandoned devices and electronic waste. Thus the children who participate in these workshops are able to experiment freely, to be creative and to learn by trial and error so that they can build their own hypotheses and learn in a constructionist learning environment. By using electronic waste we were able to limit the workshop costs and to give the children the possibility to experiment without fearing to destroy something. They can at the same time also find out which valuable and reusable parts can be found in electronic waste.

According to the constructionist approach a very important part of the workshops is the presentation of the results, not only to the peers but also online at our website dedicated to this purpose.

Since the beginning of the project the workshops have been tested with about 400 children in different schools. The workshops were documented for later evaluation. Also the habits and attitudes of about 150 children concerning the use of electronic devices were collected by use of questionnaires.
In this contribution we will present some results of the workshops as well as the findings of the questionnaires about the increasing diverse use of mobile phones by children aged 9 years and older. We also found some indications of how our workshops influence the attitudes and awareness of the participants.

Keywords:

Electronic waste, constructionism, sustainability, constructivism.