By developing Action Bounds for mobile devices, teaching concepts, workshops and accompanying materials and by organising trainings and workshops, we want to develop methods for students and teachers to bring environmental topics (climate justice, environmental justice, food sovereignty, biodiversity) and selected SDGs (Sustainable Development Goals) closer to the target groups in an innovative way, and we want to encourage and empower young people to become active themselves. We define our target groups as follows: students from 10 to 18 and biology, geography, religion and physics teachers from different schooltypes, who we want to support by offering them high quality digital content based on environmental topics. Almost all of the partners are environmental organisations from Austria, Sweden, Denmark, Malta and Bulgaria that bring in a great deal of expertise in this field . They are very experienced with environmental education and can help to reinforce key competences is this area. As environmental issues are more and more in the focus of the population, we as environmental organisations have the unique chance to join forces in order to prepare valuable content for students and teachers, and empower them to become active citizens. One key partner is a technology provider Actionbound, who will support us with their knowledge, competences and experiences to develop a fitting online tool. By using this digital tools, we also want to support teachers with ideas, how to easily include such tools into their lessons and to help to improve their digital skills. The use of mobile devices and the gamification increases the students' motivation and ensures that even children with fewer opportunities can discover their interest in environmental issues. The additional workshops and materials ensure that what has been learned can be well prepared and followed up by the teachers themselves or by the partner organisations.
The aim of "Get Active - Bound Around" was for us to learn more about digital tools in education and to integrate them into our work, as we and our partners have not yet used them. In education, we and our partners pursue the goal of empowering people to critically engage with problem areas of (non-)sustainable development and to help shape the change towards an ecologically sustainable society. We speak of education when people work interactively and reflect on experiences and contents. The project helped us to work on these goals and to introduce pupils to environmental issues in a playful way. With our content, we also wanted to give teachers a new tool to take up environmental topics in class and to use them together with their students.
The background to our project was the Covid-19 pandemic, still prevalent at the time, which changed the school system within a very short time. These changes have especially changed the use of digital media and digital learning and teaching methods, but have also strongly promoted them and raised awareness. However, these changes have also shown that not all students have equal access to digital tools and that many teachers were overwhelmed with the handling. Therefore, we chose a blended learning approach for our project, which consists of workshops and teaching concepts as well as the use of a digital tool. The implementation of the workshops is freely accessible to all on the homepages of the partner countries and on the Erasmus+ Results Platform for teachers through the handbook, which was developed in the course of the project, and can be carried out by them independently in combination with the app Actionbound. Our goal was to provide teachers with a tool that they can use independently of booked external workshops, which was especially helpful during the pandemic because schools were not accessible to outsiders, but is certainly also exciting for schools in decentralised locations that do not have the opportunity to book workshops with us or our partners. As a project team, it was also important to us that the chosen online tool can be used in groups if pupils do not have access to a tablet or smartphone. This also leads to team building and not to a frustrating competition against each other. Ultimately, it was important for us to contribute to making lessons more interactive through digitalised learning and to prepare environmental topics in a playful way in order to arouse the students' interest and motivate them to become active themselves.