Digital environmental education

Digital Environmental Education (Deedu) is an international cooperation which run for 21 months, across 2018, 2019 and 2020. It involved 4 organizations based respectively in France, Poland, Italy and the Czech Republic. The objective of the project was to combine environmental education with digital DIY, so as to inject a new approach into environmental and sustainability education. Another objective was to sensitize young participants as well as youth workers and educators on ways to actively participate in activities on and around citizen science.Overall, the project has been an opportunity to develop cutting-edge pedagogical material, initiate educators to a learning by doing approach to scientific, technical and environmental education, to exchange with other agents of the youth sector on these topics. We believe that young people involved in this venture also developed key 21st century skills such as creativity, problem-solving and communication skills. The youth practitioners affiliated to the participating organizations who were involved in this project came from a breadth of areas, some of them were familiar with digital DIY and maker education, others discovered these practices during the implementation of the project, especially in the Czech Republic.The young people who were involved in learning activites in the framework of Deedu were affiliated to local partners in France, Czech republic, Italy and Poland, for example youth centres, primary schools, community centres, makerspaces and fablabs. Their age range: 9 to 16 years old.The main learning activities that were implemented as part of Deedu were pilot tests of the intellectual outputs, public events including hands-on workshops on and around the project deliverables. The educational kit produced in the framwork of Deedu includes 3 modules: the first on monitoring environmental parameters, the second on home automation and energy saving, the third one on automated gardening. All educational ressources include physical items and written guides/tutorials, some of them rely on ad-hoc online platforms embedding IoT technology; they are available on several online platforms and can be downloaded for free by any user. IMPACT Deedu produced an impact on the following targets: young people, staff of the participating organizations, NGOs, youth practitioners in the participating organizations countries, educational institutions, instructional environments, on-line communities, and public events organizing committees.With regards young people, Deedu produced a shift in their attitude, away from consumerism and towards environmental awareness. It also empowered them vis a vis civic engagement, notably through participating in citizen science projects. As far as participating organizations and their staff are concerned our project had a positive impact in terms of visibility (visibility at local, regional level), motivation to get involved in initaitives around sustainability and ecology, enabling staff (paid staff as well as volunteers and members) to get involved in further opprotunities for training and professional growth, and launch local intiatives at the interface between digital tech and sustainability education (ex. plastic waste management initiative).Concerning third parties and stakeholders (instructional environments, online communities etc.), the main impact of our project has been an increased awareness about maker education, digital DIY, problem-based and project-based approach to learning, an increased capacity to offer non formal activities relating to environmental and sustainability education.At National, EU and international level, the project influenced gatherings of youths and youth organiztions (ex. forum français de la jeunesse), funding bodies and other programmes (ex. WearSustain), other consortia operating on EU projects (ex. Vulca project).